


Magnolia

by threesmallcrows



Series: Magnolia [1]
Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Past Domestic Violence, Past Sexual Abuse, Self-Esteem Issues, Unhealthy Relationships, past abusive relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-01-12 13:04:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18447149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: "Here is some of the code of Mello:Mello likes boys. Mello is Catholic. Mello loves the phonograph needle, the hypodermic, the tattoo; Mello loves god. Mello never loses, never concedes, will fight anyone anywhere anytime. Mello spends hours on his knees, head bowed and hands clasped. He squares a lot of circles."





	1. Glossolalia

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags. Tags will be added as the story progresses.

Sometimes Matt feels he could say anything.

 

Mostly during sex. Three years of it and it’s still too much. Like now: wrists tied, facedown, Mello above him, pushing him and pulling him. Giving him air, taking it away. One millimeter at a time.

 

That’s the closest he gets, when he’s on him and in him and Matt’s half out of his head. Sobbing and babbling and sweat-blind. When he feels himself breaking into speaking in tongues—he’s near. He could ask anything.

 

He doesn’t. The sweat dries, the fever fades. Outside, the moon sighs and turns a new page of night over.

 

Mello gets up first. Matt hears the shower go on. He sits up in a puddle of his own stains, lights a cigarette. When Mello comes back out, he’s fully dressed. Black in different sensations: leather, suede. Matt watches him pull on his boots. Their steel toe caps winking nastily at him.

 

“Studio?”

 

Mello nods.

 

“It’s late, man.”

 

“It’s early.” By which Matt knows he means: there’s not enough time. There’s never as many hours as he needs.

 

“Come back, later. If you want.”

 

By which Matt means: I always have time. I, the dog, lolling in the waste of my days. Waiting for a kicking.

 

Mello shrugs, one-shouldered.

 

Probably, the kicking’s not worth his time.

 

()

 

Matt dozes. Wakes around four. He gropes under his pillow for his laptop. Washes his bleary face in its light.

 

The cursor of his terminal blinks at him. Paused on line 440 of something. He tries to remember.

 

There’s a point, early on, where every programmer tries to bargain with the code. Come on, you say. You worked last time. Or: it’s not my fault you’re acting up. I double-triple-quadruple checked, I wrote you perfectly. God himself could not—

 

You run it again, fingers crossed. You curse when it fails.

 

Here’s the thing about code that everyone learns eventually, that Matt learned at eight years old: it is always your fault. Code doesn’t bend and code doesn’t bargain. It is made of hard, indivisible, mean little atoms of fact. If you can’t find the flaw, you need to look harder closer higher farther, you need to think better, you need to wise the fuck up, you need to pull your head out of your ass. Think. You need to learn to bend your mind around those mean little atoms like spaghetti around a fork. You need to berate yourself. Because the rules are the rules are the rules.

 

Mello is like code, that way. His rules are his rules are his rules and you live your life around them like rings around his fingers. The questions Matt doesn’t ask. The things he doesn’t say.

 

When you get on the wrong side of code it goes mute. When you get on the wrong side of Mello—who knows. Matt sure as hell doesn’t want to find out.

 

He’d kill him, maybe. Leave him, even worse.

 

So here’s something Matt doesn’t say: I wish you didn’t sleep with other people.

 

Even in his head he can’t make it,  _don’t sleep with other people_. The sticky, plaintive  _I wish._ A sign of his own essential pussy-ness.

 

He flips over, sheets against his back, cradling the edge of the laptop in the cushion of his gut. He lights a fresh cigarette off the one in his hand. Matt shouldn’t chain smoke, but Matt needs it to get calm, so he does it anyway.

 

He berates himself:

 

Constant A: Mello has always slept with a lot of people. Even before he got famous, and it certainly won’t be less now that he is.

 

Constant B: Why would he make an exception for Matt. Why would  _anyone_ , and then doubly, triply, why would Mello. Prodigy Mello, burning star. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

 

Constant C: Anyway, why does Matt care. It doesn’t matter. Matt might feel like it does but the fact is that it doesn’t. He needs to get on the right side of that rule.

 

And which of these matters the most?

 

It doesn’t matter. If A or B or C; as long as any one holds true, the result is the same. If A or B or C—Matt needs to get the fuck over it.

 

“Fuck me,” he says. Staring at line 440. He can’t remember.

 

He pauses in the dark, waiting for it to reveal itself again.

 

()

 

Out of the side of his eye Matt watches Mello go off with a boy. He’s tall, taller than Mello, taller even than Matt. Cut-diamond features, eyelashes thick as weeds after rain, a haze over his eyes.

 

He’s stop-and-stare pretty; he’s only average in this crowd.

 

This stupid fucking party. What the fuck is Matt doing here.

 

He rips his eyes off him, rips another hit off the bong. Waits for the couch to swallow him.

 

He’s dissolved into it pretty good when the guy ensconced in the loveseat kitty-corner from him says, “That’s pretty fucked, man.”

 

Matt shrugs, one-shouldered. Yet another body echo of Mello. He’s the junkyard of Mello’s habits. His lifestyle detritus.

 

“You not gonna say anything?”

 

Matt snorts. “Would you?”

 

“Sure. I would.”

 

“You don’t know him, then.” It comes out more curt than he would’ve thought possible, considering how high he is. “Anyway I thought everyone here fucked each other.”

 

“You date an asshole, you think everyone’s an asshole. Don’t pin it on the rest of us.”

 

“It’s not a big deal.”

 

“If you say so, man. Hey, pass that when you’re done.”

 

Matt breathes smoke. He’s so, so comfortable, but the man looks like he’s going to start talking to him again. So he peels himself out of the couch like a skein of jello out of its mold and wobbles outside. There’s a huge curvy pool out here and everyone is stripped down and shimmery wet, running nowhere excitedly. Jiggling. Nobody will talk to him out here. He has clothes on; he’s invisible.

 

He tucks himself into a fold of the balcony snaking around the property’s edge and counts people he recognizes. An actress. The host of a popular daytime talk show. One singer, two. Three.

 

He’s not the type to get impressed. Instead, he finds himself wondering how many of these people know Mello. How many want to fuck him. How many has he fucked. How many times—

 

“Sir? Champagne?”

 

Waitstaff. The only people low enough on the totem pole to recognize him as a guest. He considers it. Crossfading used to treat Matt fine. Now it’s liable to abuse him, leave him jittery, paranoid. Skin-crawling.

 

But Matt needs to get calm. To get higher, get lower.

 

He shakes his head.

 

“Vodka?” he asks, hopefully.

 

()

 

Matt wakes from a night he doesn’t remember ending. His head is shattering and his mouth feels like a furred piece of roadkill. His breath tastes like gasoline.

 

He tries to get up from the floor of the enormous closet he’s lying in and his head threatens to split. So he crawls, out and over an apocalypse of beautiful bodies. Seas of golden calves, golden shoulders and breasts. His toe catching in a pool of golden vomit. The house is very quiet. From the kitchen comes the faint clattering of breakfast being made. Matt ignores it. He wants to look for Mello.

 

Onward he crawls. This house, this endless mansion. Who could ever use this many rooms.

 

There, in there.

 

Like a painting: Mello, half-risen in the center of the couch in the center of the room. The felled bodies of other partiers framing him. Behind him a large shaded window, sun straining through the cracks of the blinds for the honor of touching him. His outline is threaded in gold and white against the gloom: the lean muscles of his arm, his thighs; the dandelion-head explosion of his hair, the beads of his rosary rolling down his chest like pearls.

 

 _god_ , thinks Matt, and gets stuck there:  _god, god—_

 

Mello’s contemplating something; Matt follows his gaze down, past his hips, between his legs, to the single stripe of light falling, like a twist of white candy, along the soft, sumptuous, perfect curve of eyelash-boy’s exposed ass.

 

And then Mello turns and looks at him.

 

“Hey,” he says.

 

“Hey,” says Matt. Watching him swing his leg over the naked boy, climbing off him.

 

“D’you see my shirt over there?”

 

“Uh. Don’t think so. Sorry—”

 

Mello’s mouth twists. He shakes his hand at Matt. “Gimme yours. It’s clean, right? You didn’t throw up or anything?”

 

“… I don’t remember.”

 

“Whatever. Give it here.”

 

“—Come on, man. Fuck you,” he says weakly.

 

“I need something clean.”

 

“For what?”

 

Mello levels a stare at him that could slice the top off a bottle. “It’s Sunday.”

 

He means he needs it for church.  _Straight from the depth of a man’s ass to the house of god, how d’you figure that_ —but of course Matt doesn’t say it.

 

He shucks his sweater off. It's cold without it on. Mello pulls it over his head impatiently, shoving the sleeves up, absentmindedly tucking the front into his jeans. Instantly it looks like some four-figure designer item rather than something Matt picked out of the bargain bin at the local Walmart.  _Keep it_ , he wants to say. It deserves you.

 

Mello shoves his feet into his boots. “Wanna come?”

 

“Nah. Got better things to do.”

 

“Sure. That and—” He flicks his finger at Matt’s undershirt.

 

“Yeah, funny story, that. Some raging asshole robbed me blind.”

 

“Sounds boring. Tell me never.”

 

“I want it back, you know.”

 

“Don’t cry, daddy’ll give you all five dollars you need to buy a new one.”

 

“How about fuck your five dollars—”

 

Mello swings in too close. Palming the front of Matt’s jeans: “It’ll be more than that, will it?”

 

His eyes on him. Matt’s mouth desiccates. On the couch, eyelash boy stirs slightly, tucking his arm over his bare side. Fuck Mello, fuck him for real.

 

“Thought you had somewhere to go,” he says.

 

Mello gives it a few long seconds before sliding off him. “Stay away from my service,” he says. “Don’t want you tempting any priests.”

 

()

 

Here is some of the code of Mello:

 

Mello likes boys. Mello is Catholic. Mello loves the phonograph needle, the hypodermic, the tattoo; Mello loves god. Mello never loses, never concedes, will fight anyone anywhere anytime. Mello spends hours on his knees, head bowed and hands clasped. He squares a lot of circles.

 

Lately, Mello is working on a new album and it’s making him fucking miserable. Matt doesn’t know shit about music but he knows he’s doing too much. Too many drafts, too many drugs. Too many projects on the side, still writing for more-famous-less-talented singers, producing their tracks, propping up their albums. His fingerprints all over Top 40. His suicidal fucking work ethic.

 

On a Tuesday he’s jittering and he drops Matt’s favorite mug, its handle cracking in two. Matt cleans it up silently.

 

Does it make you happy, he says to the ceramic. Do you like this, working until you can’t feel your hands?

 

Could you at least not break my shit?

 

Mello doesn’t apologize. Mello goes on suffering. He enjoys it, probably. Masochistic freak.

 

Personally, Matt could use a little less. He misses college. Smoking with Mello in rooms with no air conditioning, losing hours of their afternoons to a syrupy haze. Or fingering through corner store shelves, the foil feeling of gum, Slim Jims, deodorant, their hands colliding occasionally. He misses stamping aimlessly through adult video stores, reading the worst titles out loud; Matt snickering mid-mumble, Mello howling, throwing his head back like a hyena.

 

He misses the days spent on a lower dial. When Mello’s ambition was still something that could be contained, turned off even, for an hour or two. Now it’s exploding out of him like a parasite, a starburst or a flail, and Matt can’t touch. Can’t even get close.

 

He shifts onto his side, squinting at his phone, half-watching one of Mello’s interviews. “—and you’re known for being quite devout, how does that figure into your writing process?” “It doesn’t,” he says shortly.

 

“Better fire your makeup person,” Matt mumbles. “I can see those fucking eye bags in 240p. Bitch.”

 

He saw him four days ago. It’s not enough. He wants him here. Now. Questions he doesn’t ask: where are you, Mello? What are you doing? Who are you fucking?

 

He snakes his hand down his boxers and beats off to the silhouette of him on the backs of his eyes. Still can’t sleep. He brushes his teeth for ten minutes, opens his computer, shuts it again, scrolls and scrolls on his phone.

 

And then it’s morning again, and morning again, and morning again.

 

()

 

Sunday: finally. Mello’s head between his legs. Mouth stretched wide and warm around him.

 

And the way he looks up at him, steadily, almost unblinking. The eye contact a wire laid bare across Matt’s sizzling nerves—fuck.

 

The fact is that Mello could treat him like dirt and it wouldn’t change a thing about how perfectly he fits Matt’s type: blonde, lithe, pissy attitude. The unfettered nastiness of his eyes. The intellect roiling ill-concealed in them, lusting to tear into you like a chainsaw.

 

He tries for a roll of the hips. Gets a warning shove, hard, into the mattress. Matt nearly comes.

 

But then, Mello pops off him, saying brightly, “Oh, you’ll never guess what the priest said at confession today.”

 

Matt swears, loudly.

 

“Shh, shh,” Mello soothes, stroking the head of his cock conciliatorily.

 

“I, ah, I don’t really give a shit—”

 

“He said I should pop that bitch writer in the face.”

 

“I don’t care, I  _don’t_ care.” He is near pleading; he was so close. It’s fucking humiliating. “Tell me later—”

 

Mello glares at him and takes his hands off him completely.

 

“ _Fuck_ you!”

 

He kicks out at him—can’t punch, wrists tied and rope-burnt behind his back—and narrowly misses getting him good in the chin.

 

Mello slaps his foot down. He backs away, shrugging. “You want the slutty Catholic shtick, but you can’t eat the church stories. I don’t know what you expect of me.”

 

“I expect you to show a guy some, some fucking courtesy.”

 

It’s sort of funny, in the moment: the two of them sitting across from each other, Matt red-faced and slumped against the bedframe, Mello’s mouth still wet, his cock out between them like a line of demarcation as they talk about Mello’s priest. Like actors in a bad sitcom episode.

 

Later, it kind of pisses Matt off, how Mello can’t even finish sucking him off without getting distracted. And with the stupidest shit. Studio drama, petty feuds between producers Matt doesn’t know. How talentless the bands Matt listens to are.

 

Yeah, Matt is trash, but doesn’t he at least deserve focus for the five minutes it takes to blow him?

 

Fucking christ.

 

Mello does eventually give him a hand in the shower, which makes him feel better. Afterwards Matt is the one distracted. How skinny Mello is, the protruding cords of his muscle. A singer with the build of a cross-country runner.

 

“You juicing again?”

 

“No, that shit is stupid.”

 

“You’re scrawny.”

 

“I’m hot.”

 

“Yeah,” Matt mumbles against his neck. That shuts Mello up for a little bit.

 

“I forget,” he says, eventually.  _To eat_. His tone means: you know this.

 

“Yeah,” repeats Matt. He does know. How even in college Mello would work twenty or thirty hours at a stretch, just to beat somebody he didn’t know at a course he didn’t give a shit about. And now it  _is_ something he gives a shit about. It’s something he feeds his life.

 

What Matt doesn’t say: how it always wakes him up, when Mello gets up in the middle of the night. The clink of the weights coming off the rack. Fucking _jumprope_ (how could he think Matt could sleep through that, the thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack—how could anyone)—

 

How much sleep Matt throws away over his multicolor complexes. How tired it makes him.

 

()

 

But this, all this, has been known to Matt. The things he can and cannot say, the way Mello is, the code of him. For six years he’s learned it. Mello has carved a canyon in Matt like cataclysmic rainfall and Matt runs the course of his life in the maze of Mello’s will.

 

Things are fine.

 

Things are fine, and then Yagami shows up.

 

()

 

Nine on a Saturday morning: the dead of day. Someone is knocking, very politely. Very politely, Matt declines awakening.  _No, thank you._ He tangles his fingers in the fur of his dreams, Mello’s downy skin, whichever. Clinging to sweetness.

 

Knock, knock. Awakening loses patience. Seizes Matt by the hair and drags him into kicking range of his hangover. Knock-knocking Matt’s head right open against the pillow.

 

He grabs the nearest whatever and hurls it at the door.

 

Less than ten seconds and the sound starts up again.

 

Matt gives up. Mello groans as he jostles him. “Matt, you bitch—”

 

“Sorry, there’s some asshole—”

 

He cracks the door, squinting against the apocalyptic blast of light from the hallway.

 

“Good morning.”

 

The man standing outside looks like a stock photo. Or an ad for homeowners’ insurance. He looks like he never needed braces.

 

“My apologies for waking you. I’m looking for someone by the name of Mihael Keehl.”

 

“Wrong place.”

 

“Or, by the name of Mello?”

 

That gives Matt pause. For all the people that know Mello, nobody has ever come here looking for him: Matt’s scabby apartment, his scabby existence. He reconsiders the man. He’s pretty enough to run in one of Mello’s circles but way too square-looking. Maybe some kind of agent? A PR guy?

 

But Mihael Keehl—who the hell?

 

“…Sorry, who are you?”

 

A long moment of silence.

 

And then Matt is ripped from his lean against the frame; the door chain torn from its track. Mello, passing like a nightmare. Snarling, pale. Eyes turned on his seeker like a sailor on a star.

 

“I told you never to come here. I fucking told you—”

 

Matt stumbles back.

 

Breathes the beginning of some question—

 

And Mello reaches behind him without looking and smashes Matt’s door shut so hard in his face that he feels his walls tremble, feels the dark all around him shake.

 

He reels. In the still-rattling silence presses a hand to his nose. Half-expects to find it bleeding.

 

()

 

Mihael Keehl is a goddamn bug under Matt’s skin.

 

Matt sleeps less and less; Mello sleeps even littler. They catch each other gasping awake at one in the morning, at two or four. Wary as boxers, they glance sideways at one another out of dimly-lit corners, fenced in by the glow of a fridge, a phone, Matt’s lighter, Mello’s.

 

Mello works out too much, goes to the studio, spins his tires, disappears. Matt smokes until his lungs feel tarred and resiny and thick with deposits. Buying grams on grams. He shivers his way to a nervy high and lies on the plateau of his mattress, skin itching. Bugged out.

 

“Fuck me,” he whispers. One hand scratching the crook of his arm compulsively.

 

He took too much. Matt needs to dry the fuck out. Matt needs to let the fuck go.

 

He squirms onto his side. The knuckles of one dangling hand dragging against the floor. Cool, feels nice. “Mihael Keehl,” he mumbles. Fucking noise. Nothing.

 

He looks over the edge of the bed. Beneath him sprawls the valley of the face of a man he does not know.

 

()

 

“Is this tight enough?”

 

Matt can’t speak around the cloth in his mouth. Otherwise he’d say  _yes, fuck. Quit it already._

 

Somewhere behind him Astrid gives a tug. He swears, spit soaking the gag. She’s gonna crack a fucking rib.

 

“Don’t give me that look.” Her hair tickles the periphery of his vision. Near-white, snow-like. He scratches his face on his shoulder.

 

“I know you can take more,” she says.

 

He does. He has. The eight months he and Astrid had were a good thing. Sex and ropes and blind obedience. The way it started as soon as he came over: “I’m feeling like whiskey,” she’d say, and he’d go to her fridge and serve her drinks in her own house. The orders building on each other piece by piece, was exactly the kind of disciplined foreplay Mello never had patience for. Fucking hot.

 

Afterwards, she unties him. Mutely he inspects the marks on his arms, his throat. They always look bad but fade fast. He used to wish that they’d last longer. Her ownership written all over him.

 

“All right?” she asks him.

 

“Yeah. Thanks. Smoke?”

 

“Sure.”

 

She takes the first puff. Peers at him. “Listen. We can do this thing. But I won’t be your rebound again.”

 

“I haven’t broken up with anyone.”

 

“Sure. You seem the same as last time. That look of yours. I’m not managing another Xinlei situation.”

 

“Nope.” He drags. Long and longer, holding it until his lungs crackle like fall leaves. “Not that.”

 

“Good. Fool you twice, shame on you.”

 

“I know.”

 

They are silent for a while, passing the cigarette back and forth.

 

“You can stay for an hour, if you want.”

 

“Thanks. I think I’ll go.”

 

“Are you all right? It’s not like you, to come back.”

 

“It’s not like you to offer me to stay.”

 

“Yeah, well. People change.”

 

“They do.”

 

He leaves her the rest of the cigarette. The rope burns have faded by the time he gets home.

 

()

 

Xinlei, little five-foot-two Xinlei with her two long braids. She came before Astrid, who came before Mello. They were together for four years and ten months. She taught him a lot. That everything he thought about himself was right. Then she taught him new things to think about himself.

 

Like the time he liked some random hot chick’s Instagram photos, just because he knew she would know (because she had the passwords to both his phones, those days; because Matt had given them up without a word when she’d demanded them).

 

To spite her; maybe, maybe because he hated her, a little bit.

 

Then she had taught them both that he could handle screaming and dragging and the bite of her nails, but not the cold shoulder. That a week of silence could fuck him up until he couldn’t sleep. Until he shook with  _please._

 

He slept one hour and woke. Slept ten minutes and slunk to her fridge in the middle of the night. Inside found that she had labeled all her tupperware in Sharpie: “ _for people only_ ”.

 

He stood struck stock-still. He understood, then. Closed the door and crept back into her bedroom to curl down hungry at the foot of her bed. Waiting for her to speak to him, to look at him.

 

Oh, that one stuck. He still uses that one now, even though he tries not to.  _You’re not a person, Matt._ In his own voice he hears it:  _You’re not a fucking person._

 

Nobody knows about Xinlei, other than Astrid, and that was only because he was still such a fucking mess when they started hooking up. Bursting at the seams with her. Flayed and hobbling. He would even cry sometimes. Astrid hovering outside her closed bathroom door, so embarrassed for him. She had just wanted a quick fuck. Fucking christ.

 

Astrid, though; she’s good for him. She has never once changed the terms she laid out the first time she met him: that it would be strictly sex, that she was engaged, that Matt was there to provide the type of play her fiancee did not feel comfortable with and nothing more.

 

If he lets slip what he’s doing now—using her to fuck him into getting over Mello’s fucking—she’ll never let him back into her bed.

 

 _I won’t be your rebound again,_ she’d said, and he’d said,  _You’re not._

 

Just another white lie to slip under his tongue, cradle to his gums as he slips into dreams where he apologizes, where he speaks.

 

()

 

Probably, Matt should lay back a little on the smoking. Lately he’s beginning to wrap around the wrong side of coping. Paranoia chewing him like gum. He misses Mello even as he fucks him. Looks over his shoulder for him as they tumble locked-together over the consecutive cliffs of their orgasms. He’s never had much of a refractory, in body or in heart. He’s good for that at least.

 

Christ, he needs to be settled. Would Mello deign to use him as his footrest?

 

Anxiety pries Matt loose from his high. He’s alone and starving. He fumbles himself into shower sandals, very slowly, dialing in instructions to his feet over miles and miles of sputtering electric cable. His faulty wiring.

 

There’s a hole in his left sock. The gnarled, cheesy nail of his big toe winks at him.

 

_You’re the booger in the eye of the world._

 

Matt goes out.

 

He finds Mello at the corner store. Row after row of him, his tattoos and fuck-me fuck-you stare splashed down the magazine racks. They’ve photoshopped him. He’s prettier in person. “THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS”, the title reads.

 

He doesn’t take one. It’s not like Mihael fucking Keehl will be in there. Even so his fingers itch. He turns and plunges his arms into the freezer by the counter. Swimming his hands around in the cold depths like fish, Magnum bars and otter pops rolling over his skin like coins. Sure, he’ll take the pocket change of small pleasures.

 

But then he shifts angle and the sight of his reflection in the freezer lid rears back and strikes him in the face, skitters his peace all over the floor.

 

Matt flinches.

 

He hates being reminded that he looks like that.

 

Worse, he could be better. He has been before. Like—back when he was with Xinlei. He’d dressed up to her level. Lost weight for her. Jogging miles until he tasted rust. Melting a new jawline, new cheekbones out of himself.

 

_Weren’t you just a little doll for her._

 

And what of it? Can he say he’s better off now, with his stoner gut, his threadbare t-shirts?

 

Some people are potters and some are clay, and he is a shopping cart with a broken wheel, always listing towards the worse. He requires constant correction to his course.

 

A wonderful memory: him lying on the floor and her kneeling on his chest, one hand pressed down over his eyes as she pierced the shell of his left ear with the little gun that reminded him of a stapler. She bought him metal bar earrings, pushed them into him too early. Stretching him wide open.

 

He didn’t mind. Kind of enjoyed it.

 

A bell goes off. Matt jumps as someone comes into the store. Dropping the Drumstick he was holding. A phantom pain flits in his ear. He fingers the lobe, searching for the hole in himself. Curls away from the magazines and from Mello and Mello and Mello, like a slug curling from salt.

 

_Don’t look at me._

 

He’s going fucking insane—just a bad batch of weed, calm down—no, he can’t. He’s going to crawl out of his fucking skin and—

 

back to her—

 

Finally, a thought that wakes him, the waking of gunning your car 90-an-hour over the median. Your forehead through the windshield. Your neck flayed open by glass.

 

That he would consider going back.

 

That maybe he will, if he stays like this.

 

He has to move. He has to get out of his damn head.

 

_Come on, Jeevas._

 

Move!

 

()

 

Light Yagami lives in a nice place. Not celebrity nice, “industry” nice. Not like the houses Mello parties at, those dim-lit dens, palm-treed Sodoms. Those are loose asshole places. Yagami’s high-rise has more of a clenched vibe.

 

Matt hunches in his car across the street. He watches the lobby. The various low sofas in taupes and browns, the ugly metal abstract sculpture. A bored-looking receptionist sits barely visible behind her enormous desk.  Even at two in the morning, it’s lit brightly, like a Chinese restaurant. The same kind of sterile anti-mood-lighting.

 

Definitely clenched. Even an ant couldn’t sneak in there.

 

What does Mello see in this place? Rather: what does Mello see in a man who lives in this place?

 

Finding Yagami wasn’t difficult. Matt’s apartment complex, shithole that it is, does have a security camera system. It uploads its footage to some server through an unsecured Wifi network that Matt taps into while sitting in his own lobby, enjoying the air conditioning since his is out. All he has to do is watch the traffic flow by, sieving out the bits of data from the source he’s interested in. Soon he has Yagami’s face and the license plate of his black Beemer, totally incongruous as it pulls in next to the workhorse Subarus and Pintos of the apartment’s parking lot. From there to obtain his PII is a matter of a few messages to the right people. Matt’s not huge in the underground, but he’s helped with enough hacks that he’s owed a few favors.

 

Light Yagami is thirty-one years old. He is neither an insurance agent nor a stock photo model, but a lawyer, which, well—close enough. He’s single, or at least he filed his taxes that way. He has little online presence: no Twitter, no Instagram, only a dust-covered Facebook page that hasn’t been updated since 2015. His profile photo is the same as his class picture from university, where he is listed as having graduated summa cum laude.

 

It’s not enough. Matt dumpster-dives farther. He has two mailing addresses listed, in LA and in Philadelphia. He has three traffic convictions. All for speeding.

 

In the few photos he’s tagged in he smiles easily at the camera, never caught squinting or mid-chew. He has great teeth. Matt’s teeth are just OK. He has two gold fillings in the molars at the back, from cavities he got as a kid. His pimp teeth.

 

Still not enough.

 

And?

 

And following Mello here wasn’t difficult. Matt’s been following him all his life.

 

He went in two hours ago. Hasn’t been back out since.

 

Matt drags his hands over his face.

 

It’s cold out, this late, even in LA. But he can’t turn his engine on to get the heat going; it’s too suspicious to keep his car idling. He fidgets, increasingly uncomfortable, rubbing his arms. The clock glowing in his console hovers suspended somewhere in the dregs of the hours between two and three, like an apple that forgot to fall.

 

“Shit,” he mumbles. “I need to go.” He shouldn’t even have come in the first place. He doesn’t need to make this worse than it already is. He knows this.

 

He stays. Waiting uncomfortably next to the depths of himself. Feeling the dread pool to his chin.

 

()

 

It’s Mello who comes out first. Matt sees the receptionist jump as he slams through the door and spills down the stairs, nearly crashing into a lamppost, swerving around it just in time to bend over nearly perpendicular to the gutter and vomit into the street.

 

Yagami follows after him, catching and quieting the swinging door. He comes down the steps slowly. Mello spits and heaves like a cat. His hair is hanging in his face, like it always does. Matt has held it back many times before. Yagami doesn’t. He stands a little distance away, arms crossed against the cold.

 

Matt’s pulse lashes in him. He feels hyperaware. After hours of nothing, adrenaline is grinding his senses to a cutting edge so fast it hurts. The intense orange of the sodium streetlight wadded thick as a gag in his mouth. Smells of leather and vomit crowding him. He can see the wet around Mello’s mouth from clear across the street. Can nearly feel the long glittering smear it leaves on the back of his hand as he wipes it clean.

 

Mello straightens up marginally, leaning hard against the lamppost. Yagami says something to him, still standing at a remove. Mello shakes his head and jerks himself to his feet. As soon as he lets go of the lamppost, he veers sideways. Yagami jerks forward, grabs him by the arm. He lets go almost immediately, but Mello stumbles towards him anyway, head lowered. He butts into his chest, and stays there.

 

For a moment, they stand still, like actors who’ve stumbled past the last page of their script.

 

Then slowly, slowly, Yagami’s arms rise around him.

 

Mello does not hug him back, but he doesn’t move away either.

 

Matt’s ears are ringing. Leaking a tinny sound until it fills his car like gas, until he can’t hear anything for it.

 

He catches himself barely breathing.

 

()

 

_snororlax is online_

 

_snororlax is typing…_

 

[snororlax]: hey

 

[snororlax]: knock knock bitch

 

[snororlax]: quit ignoring me i know youre there

 

_r34l___qu1k is online_

 

[snororlax]: jesus finally the queen arrives

 

_r34l___qu1k is typing…_

 

[r34l___qu1k]: thanks….. a man cant be too easy in these trying times

 

[r34l___qu1k]: long time no see snor bb… what brings u back to daddys neck of the woods..

 

[snororlax]: why are you always like this

 

[r34l___qu1k]: （＾＿－）≡★

 

[snororlax]: can i say gross

 

[r34l___qu1k]: can i say… succ my dic…

 

[snororlax]: sure i’ll come over rn

 

[r34l___qu1k]: nuff foreplay… tell daddy what u need….

 

[snororlax]: remember the paypal thing

 

[r34l___qu1k]: sure i remember.. the most epic thing ever…

 

[r34l___qu1k]: u cashing in ur favors bb..?

 

[snororlax]: yup

 

[snororlax]: how hard do you think itd be

 

[snororlax]: to get into someones house

 

_r34l___qu1k is typing…_

 

()

 

The door swings open without sound.

 

Matt takes one step in, and another, and stops.

 

The apartment is large and cool, dim even though it’s the afternoon already; there’s a shade drawn tight over the large window at its far end. It’s dead silent in a way that Matt’s place never is, save for the ticking of a large mechanical clock on a table in the foyer. Electronic eyes blink in time, red and green in the gloom. Security devices. Matt ignores them; they’ve been neutered, for now.

 

Frozen inside the doorway, he looks around. Nice, heavy-looking furniture. Tasteful objects in bronze and steel. The place feels like a hotel. The same strained cleanliness. It gives off no smell, no heat. It is free of any fingerprint of life.

 

He tries to imagine Mello here.

 

Impossible. Mello would dirty this place just by the filth he says.

 

The clock ticks once, the sound crisp, like the flick of a lighter. Matt flinches. He nearly leaves right then.

 

But then he smells it. Sunken beneath the hum of cleaning fluids and carpet powder, like the stain you could never scrub out: the familiar tar cuss of Mello’s cigarette spits in Matt’s eye.

 

He steps farther in.

 

Matt doesn’t really know what he’s looking for. He doesn’t have to. He sees the video camera nearly right away.

 

It’s set up in a corner of a small room, not visible from the entrance, that could be a guest bedroom or nursery. There’s not much else inside: a low leather couch, a coffee table, a single uncomfortable-looking modern chair.

 

The smell of smoke is much stronger in here.

 

He steps behind the camera. Turns it on.

 

In the video, Mello is sitting on that couch. Arms crossed, legs open. He looks wary and slightly tense, spinning one of the rings on his finger compulsively with his thumb, that small movement almost the only motion on the screen. Someone sitting out of view behind the camera is asking him questions in a low, quiet voice.

 

 _Please state your name,_ Matt hears.

 

“Mello.”

 

_And you are Mihael Keehl?_

 

“That’s what they called me at the abbey.”

 

The clock strikes again, a nervous tick. Matt’s phone goes off in his pocket so suddenly that Matt nearly knocks the camera over.

 

[r34l___qu1k]: u got 5min bb

 

[r34l___qu1k]: cant keep his security system down 4ever

 

Matt looks again at the camera. The timestamp at the bottom shows the footage runs on for hours. He doesn’t understand. He feels the way he does after waking from a blackout, hazy and confused. Like he’s missing something important.

 

Onscreen, the tiny, frozen image of Mello looks straight at him.

 

He only hesitates a moment longer.

 

He leaves the apartment with the memory card in his pocket. Heavy as the bullet you never used.


	2. The Catechisms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read the tags. Tags will be added as the story progresses.

(STATIC)

 

Fuck you. Find yourself a better victim. No one will cry at the sight of me.

 

_There are no good victims, Mello. Do you understand that?_

 

_… Mello?_

 

(STATIC)

 

_Please state your name._

 

Mello.

 

_And you are Mihael Keehl?_

 

That’s what they called me at the abbey.

 

_Is that what you want me to call you?_

 

I’m not Mihael Keehl.

 

_… Mello, then._

 

(STATIC)

 

_—were a resident at Kolokhna Abbey._

 

Yeah.

 

_For how long?_

 

Fourteen years.

 

_How did you come to live there?_

 

I don’t remember. I was too young. The brothers told me I was abandoned there, like the other orphans.

 

_Was that true?_

 

I don’t see why not.

 

_Do you know who your parents are?_

 

No.

 

_You never tried to find them?_

 

No.

 

_You weren’t curious?_

 

Other boys were.

 

_Why?_

 

They thought it would tell them something about themselves.

 

_You didn’t think so?_

 

No.

 

(STATIC)

 

_You knew Petr Ilina._

 

We called him Brother Petr.

 

_How did you first meet him?_

 

I got moved into his class.

 

_He was a teacher?_

 

Yeah, history and languages.

 

_When did this happen?_

 

I don’t know. Maybe when I was around ten.

 

_You said “moved into”?_

 

I wasn’t supposed to be in his class. He taught the older boys, thirteen, fourteen-year-olds. They only put me in with him because I was starting too much shit in my own grade.

 

_How so?_

 

Like showing up my teacher. Challenging him. I was smarter than anybody in his fucking class, smarter than him, too. He didn’t like that.

 

_So they transferred you up._

 

It was a last ditch resort.

 

_Why last ditch?_

 

They didn’t like us to treat us special. Thought it’d put notions in our head.

 

_Humility comes before honor._

 

And I already had a proud heart. So they tried everything else to stop it. Detention, extra chores. Beating, obviously. It didn’t work. None of that ever worked on me. So out I went.

 

_And did moving into his class help?_

 

No.

 

_Why not?_

 

The curriculum was better suited to me, but the problem was the class.

 

_The other boys?_

 

I got along even less with them than the ones my own age. I’d get into two, three fights a week. I was always showing up with a black eye or my nose busted. Still, I gave as fucking good as I got. I remember getting up in the middle of class and spitting blood onto some boy’s essay.

 

(LAUGH)

 

I was not a nice fucking kid. Blessed are the meek, they told us. They should’ve said, _and damned are the disobedient_. If I’d just settled down, played nice, and kept my fucking mouth shut, maybe none of the shit would’ve happened. But, me being me…

 

_You, being you—Petr noticed you._

 

How could he not? I didn’t give him a choice.

 

_When was the first time you knew?_

 

It was around Epiphany. I was outside the dorm, smoking, and—

 

_Smoking?_

 

I’d stolen them—the cigarettes. Only about half of us boys were orphans. The other half had families. They went back home twice a year, for Easter and Christmas. We weren’t allowed to receive anything at the abbey, not even letters, so they usually came back with little gifts, oranges or chocolate, gloves, shit like that. Then, every year like clockwork, us orphans would beat the shit out of them and rob them blind. So I must’ve taken the pack off somebody.

 

_I see. Please continue; you were smoking outside your dormitory._

 

It was late. After lights out. Freezing cold. I’m standing there in the dark. Then _he_ suddenly comes fucking around the corner.

 

I remember I didn’t put the cigarette out.

 

_Why not? You were breaking the rules, I assume?_

 

I was. I don’t know. Maybe I was daring him to fuck with me. Fucking stupid of me. Of course he could fuck with me. He was an adult. He could do anything he wanted.

 

_So what did he do?_

 

Not what I would’ve thought.

 

He stopped right in front of me. Then he reached into his pocket and took out his own carton of cigarettes. He holds one out to me and says, “Could you spare your brother a light?”

 

_How did you respond to that?_

 

(LAUGH)

 

I lit him up.

 

We just stood there, smoking together in the dead of night. Like this was totally normal.

 

I don’t know what he was thinking. Me, I was trying to figure him the hell out. Obviously he knew I’d stolen the cigarettes. Most of the Brothers would have hit you for that. They’d at least have taken away the cigarettes. But he was just standing there, puffing away.

 

He already had a reputation among the boys of being a soft touch. I’d never even seen him hit a boy in class. Maybe, I thought, I’d just lucked out. But then why ask me for a light? Why smoke with me? I didn’t understand.

 

Of course, in hindsight, it’s perfectly fucking clear.

 

I wonder if he’d already made up his mind, at that point. If he’d already chosen me.

 

(PAUSE)

 

I remember he finished his cigarette first. He ground it out, and then he looked at me and smiled.

 

He said, “Let’s let this be our secret, shall we?”

 

And that was—

 

That was the first time.

 

(PAUSE)

 

_What happened after that?_

 

Nothing. I kept thinking he’d tell on me. He didn’t.

 

Then he started trying to talk to me.

 

_That was unusual?_

 

Brothers didn’t talk to boys more than they needed to. We were like animals to them.

 

_How did you react to it?_

 

It freaked me out.

 

I started acting up again. Picking fights with anyone who so much as looked at me. I started shit with him, too. When he called on me to read, I’d read backwards, or in English. I’d turn in his exams blank. I turned some in with every answer wrong.

 

I guess, eventually, he had had enough. One day, he kept me aside after class. He told me, “You know, statistically speaking, no one gets all the answers on a test wrong by guessing. If someone manages to get every single answer incorrect, it usually means he knows all the answers.”

 

I didn’t say anything. Of course I knew all the answers.

 

He sighed. He said, “I can see you’re very bright, even if you’re trying to hide it for some reason. I know you can do better on these. Why aren’t you?”

 

I said I hated tests.

 

He asked why.

 

I said because they were boring. All of it was. The recitations and the essays, the problem sheets, the multiple-fucking-choice questions. Like tigers jumping through hoops at a circus.

 

He said that I ought to ease up on hoops, that they could be pretty fun.

 

I told him tigers weren’t meant to do tricks. Tigers were meant to kill prey in the forest.

 

He laughed at that. He told me, “How about this: if you don’t play games with me, I won’t play games with you.”

 

_Which meant?_

 

I wasn’t sure either. But after that he started to give me special assignments.

 

_What kind of assignments?_

 

Things that had nothing to do with whatever he was teaching. Like a physics paper, or an essay on the influence of Nabokov. I liked the news articles best. At the abbey, we got very little information about the outside world. While the other boys sat around butchering verb tenses, I got to read about the creation of the Euro and the school shootings in the US and the Y2K crisis.

 

It was the first time I’d realized there was a whole world, out there, infinitely larger than what i knew. It was amazing, and it was torture. The abbey became claustrophobic. I hated it even more than I had before.

 

_Why do you think he gave you these?_

 

To get me to talk with him.

 

_You had discussions with him about them?_

 

Not exactly. He told me I didn’t have to do anything, except write whatever I thought in the margins. Then I’d turn it in to him, and then the next class, instead of grading them, he’d write responses to me. We went back and forth like that.

 

_I see. It was his way of starting a dialogue with you._

 

It was smart of him. If he’d tried actually talking to me, I’d probably have kicked him in the leg and run away. I was an antisocial little psycho.

 

_Did you find all of this strange? You knew you were being treated differently than the others?_

 

I did. I was wary of it. But I also liked it.

 

_Why?_

 

Because I always thought…

 

I always wanted to be different. I _was_ different.

 

… Probably, also, I was tired of being alone.

 

_You didn’t have many friends?_

 

I didn’t have any.

 

_Why not?_

 

I wasn’t good.

 

_How do you mean, “good”?_

 

I had this anger. I’ve always had it. It scared people. It scared me, sometimes.

 

You know the expression “seeing red”?

 

_Like in bullfighting?_

 

It was like that. It would come over me in a giant wave. Pushing me down. It was like I’d gone blind. Nothing could stop it. I couldn’t stop it.

 

In the Church, they believe in possession. Sometimes I wondered if I was possessed. Sometimes I wanted to be.

 

_You wanted to be possessed?_

 

Because it would be easier, that way. If it was something external. Then I wouldn’t go to Hell for the things I’d done. I wasn’t scared of much back then, but I was scared of that.

 

_Hell?_

 

It sounds silly?

 

_Not at all. All children are scared of monsters under the bed._

 

It wasn’t monsters under the fucking bed. It’s different, when you’re raised in the Church. Hell isn’t some imaginary concept, some idea. It’s a real place. Real as this room. It waits for you. Your whole life, they tell you that. They _show_ you. You know how they taught us about Hell?

 

_How?_

 

They would heat a glass cup in the fireplace and make us hold our hands over the rim. See. I still have the scar.

 

They told us, Hell is like this, but forever.

 

(PAUSE)

 

_I’m sorry they did that to you._

 

(PAUSE)

 

_What things did you do?_

 

Hm?

 

_That you were afraid you would go to Hell?_

 

What things did I do.

 

(LAUGH)

 

What things did I fucking do? What didn’t I?

 

I stole. I fought. I lied. I cursed the Father. Had impure thoughts. I touched myself. Touched other boys. I liked men. I did what I did to the boy named Yaroslav. I demonstrated no contrition.

 

I disobey. Even when I try not to, I always...

 

Maybe being born was the first mistake.

 

Of course, I also slept with Petr Ilina.

 

Among other things.

 

(STATIC)

 

One day he told me to come with him, that he wants to show me something.

 

We went out to the east wing. I’d never been there. It’s where the brothers lived. I followed him up into a room. His room.

 

_What was in his room?_

 

Books.

 

_Books?_

 

He had a private library hidden up there. He’d built bookshelves into all of his walls, floor-to-ceiling, filled them, God knows how. There was everything, not just religious stuff: novels, journals, encyclopedias…

 

It was overwhelming. I didn’t know what to think. I told him he wasn’t supposed to have this. He said maybe he wasn’t, but what the other Brothers didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. I sensed a chance. I threatened him. I told him I could get him in trouble.

 

_Did you ever make good on that?_

 

No. He said, “Please, don’t.” That’s it. And I never told.

 

The first time, he let me stay for a long time. I remember there was only one chair in the room, for the desk, and he sat there, so I sat on the floor. Reading. I don’t remember about what.

 

_What did he do, while you were reading?_

 

I don’t know. Maybe just—watching.

 

Eventually, he said I had to go, that I would be missed if I stayed longer. I wanted to take some of the books with me. He said no, you only get to read them in here. He put his hand on my head and said to be patient, that he would take me back when it was safe to. That rushing would only get us in trouble. “All in time,” he said.

 

_Did you go back there with him again?_

 

Yes. It became a regular thing. He’d find me sometime when I was alone, usually when I was supposed to be doing chores, and we’d go up there. I’d stay for thirty minutes or an hour. Never as long as the first time. I always wanted to stay longer. Not just because of the books. I liked his room. It was warm. He had a space heater. The boys’ dorm was always freezing. Sometimes, he’d give me food he’d saved from the Brothers’ dinner. Sometimes we’d smoke a cig together. He’d lift me up so I could blow smoke out of the window.

 

_When he brought you to his room, did he stay with you?_

 

Yes. Always.

 

_Did he talk to you?_

 

Not that much at first. More, as time went on.

 

_What did you talk about?_

 

I don’t know. Things I read. Christ, what did someone like him have to talk about with someone like me?

 

It wasn’t important what we said. It was about the—the feeling.

 

_The feeling?_

 

That he trusted me. That I could trust him.

 

_Did you?_

 

Trust him? I didn’t want to.

 

But he wasn’t like any of the other Brothers. No matter how nasty I was to him, what kind of filth I said, he wouldn’t react, or he’d just laugh it off. He was the first person I couldn’t provoke into some kind of reaction.

 

_He wasn’t scared of you._

 

I didn’t know how to deal with something like that.

 

(PAUSE)

 

You ever seen those videos of dogs? The ones that’re all fucked up because they had bad owners?

 

_I think I know what you mean._

 

Right, and then it gets rescued, and they hold out food to it for the first time. And the dog is howling and biting. It has pride, it has fear, it’s angry, it’s snarling. It doesn’t trust; it knows it’s smart not to trust. But the thing is, the dog always fucking gives in anyway. The hope gets the better of it in the end.

 

He was nice. He was nice to me.

 

I didn’t even know what nice was.

 

(STATIC)

 

—found it in his desk. He probably planted it.

 

_Why do you think he planted it?_

 

It was the first time he’d left me alone. He said he had to go do something. He had one of those desk drawers that locked, but he’d left it open. He must’ve known I’d look.

 

It was lying right on top, the magazine. It was in some language I didn’t know, Latin script—not English, maybe French. It was small, more like a novel than a magazine. The pages were thin, smelled like ink. I remember I gave myself a papercut, opening it. The taste of the blood in my mouth.

 

I turned it to a random page. It was a double-page spread, in color. The picture was of a woman and a man. They were both naked, except for rubber animal masks. The woman was wearing a rabbit’s head, the man a tiger. The woman was bent over a table. The man was standing behind her. He had a whip. He was hitting her with it.

 

I couldn’t stop looking at it. I had never seen anything like that.

 

_Did you know what it was?_

 

Sex? I don’t know. I didn't know shit about sex. I knew it was bad. I knew you were only supposed to do it when you got married. I’d gathered from what the older boys said that it felt good, but I also thought it was supposed to hurt, since I’d heard something about it making you bleed. I guess I had some confused image, of a husband and wife taking out knives at the wedding ceremony and cutting each other.

 

I didn’t connect any of this with what I saw in that photo. But I did sense that it was wrong. The nakedness, especially. It was—it disturbed me.

 

_Because you’d never seen it before?_

 

No. Because...

 

_Because?_

 

Wait just one fucking second. I’m trying to...

 

It’s—if you weren’t raised in the Church, you can’t understand the, the fucking shame it teaches you about the body. Your body.

 

The first time you get hard, you…

 

(LAUGH)

 

It sounds so fucking stupid. But you’re honestly terrified of that thing between your legs. It’s like some wild animal that’s suddenly snuck into your bed. You just don’t know what to do.

 

At the same time, you can’t stop thinking about it, because you’re, what, twelve or thirteen, and that’s the fucking way it is. And then you touch yourself for the first time, and you hate yourself. Really fucking hate yourself. Some boys tried to burn themselves, or cut themselves. Every year, it happened. Really.

 

And of course, nobody is explaining to you what’s happening, and you’re afraid to talk about it, and everyone else is afraid to talk about it, so you think you’re alone, on top of it all. You’re slinking around everyday, stressed to hell, horny as hell, threat of mortal sin breathing down your fucking neck. For a while, you really start to think you’re going insane.

 

So I guess I was standing there, all of that going through my head, and then in the middle of all that, Petr comes back in and asks me what I was doing.

 

_What did you do?_

 

I didn’t put it down. It was like with the cigarette. I knew this was something he wasn’t supposed to have. So I held it, and I looked right at him. I asked him what it was.

 

He said they were private pictures.

 

I asked him if they were bad.

 

He said that the Church thought so.

 

I asked him, what about God?

 

He smiled. “I like that you make that distinction,” he said. “It’s more important than you know.” He said all things considered, what with Columbine and the Albanian massacres and whatnot, he didn’t think God minded too much about some photos.

 

I said good, because I had looked at them.

 

He said, “I know.”

 

He held out his hand. I gave it to him. He looked at the picture I’d been looking at for a while.

 

He asked me, which one do you like? When I didn’t say anything, he pointed at the girl. “You like her?”

 

I said no. “Then what about him?” he asked. He pointed at the man. I thought about it. I did like him. The tiger mask was cool. I liked how strong he looked, and the whip in his hand. He was the one who was doing the hurting. He had the power.

 

Yes, I said.

 

“You want to do that to someone?” he asked.

 

I said yes.

 

He looked at me, and he said, “You’re going to grow up to break somebody’s heart.”

 

(STATIC)

 

_—happened, with the boy called Yaroslav?_

 

Some time had passed by then. At least a year.

 

Yaroslav was in Petr’s class with me. He was a little older than me, maybe thirteen or fourteen when I was twelve. I remember he was built big for his age, stocky, pale. He had a heavy face. Expressionless, like a slab of wood. Came across as pretty stupid.

 

_Did you get along with him?_

 

We didn’t like each other. But it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, since I didn’t like anyone, and none of the older kids in my class liked me. So I don’t remember exactly how it started. Maybe someone stole some shit from his room, or something; that was always happening. Anyway, it wasn’t me, for once. But he thought it was. So one day, him and his gang of friends cornered me after vespers and beat me up. I fought back, but there were four of them and I wasn’t fucking superhuman, so they got me pretty good.

 

I got beat all the time. This was nothing special. But before they left, he leaned down and said something to me.

 

He said that he knew what I was up to with Petr.

 

_What did he mean by that? He knew Petr was taking you up to his room?_

 

I don’t know. It was probably an empty threat. Anyone with eyes in his head could see I was closer with Petr than anyone. But I freaked the fuck out. I thought he knew somehow, about the library, the dirty magazine, everything. I knew I had to keep him from telling. I had to get him good.

 

I made a plan.

 

Yaroslav wasn’t one of the orphans, and after last Christmas’ visit, he’d been talking about how he’d gotten a girlfriend down in the village. Of course none of us believed him. But he did keep a photo of some girl on him that he said was her.

 

Anyway, I stole that photo. I told him to come to the bell tower after lights out. Alone, I said, or I’d turn it in to the Brothers, and he’d get in trouble with his parents. He did come, alone. He was never very smart.

 

I had a knife from the kitchen.

 

First, I showed him the photo, and I told him his girlfriend was watching everything. Then I told him to take his clothes off.

 

He did. His shirt, then his pants. His body was even paler than his face. Almost no body hair. His dick looked like a worm. I told him to touch himself. He started crying. I put the knife against his stomach until he did it. But he couldn’t get hard.

 

I wasn’t satisfied. He had threatened Petr. He had threatened to take him away from me. I wanted more.

 

So I moved the knife up over his neck. I told him to put his mouth on mine. He said no, he didn’t want to. I told him to do it, or else I would cut him. So he did.

 

He was crying the whole time.

 

I remember how he tasted like salt.

 

I liked it. I liked how it made me feel.

 

(PAUSE)

 

Petr found out, of course. Yaroslav was always a little bitch.

 

He took me up to his room and said that he had told him what had happened. He told me that he said I had made him get naked. That I touched him. I denied it. He asked me why he would make something like that up. I started spinning lies. I said it had been Yaroslav with the knife, that it was the other way around and he had forced me. I told him he had dirty thoughts, that everyone knew he was a pervert and a sinner. I showed him the photo—in the end I hadn’t even given it back to him.

 

He looked at it. He said that she was very pretty, that Yaroslav was lucky.

 

I said that she was his whore.

 

Petr hit me. Across the face, not very hard. He had never hit me before. That shut me up. We looked at each for a second. He looked as surprised as me.

 

He apologized. His voice sounded shaky. Then he said he needed to ask me something serious.

 

He asked me if I liked boys.

 

(PAUSE)

 

_What did you say?_

 

I told him no. I wasn’t stupid. Everyone knew boys who liked boys went to Hell. It was mortal sin.

 

_Did you believe that?_

 

That it was sin?

 

_That you didn’t like men._

 

(PAUSE)

 

Even before I met Petr, I think I…

 

But it was impossible. To even consider it, to think about it, at all, was putting your soul in danger.

 

It was like—it always reminded me of when one of the buildings caught fire.

 

We made hay at the abbey, like most of the farms in the area. After harvest, we’d roll it all up into an old wood tower at the edge of the grounds. Well, one of the boys must have been hiding inside, having a smoke, and dropped his cigarette on accident. The whole tower went up like a torch. They called the cops, but the closest fire department was fifty kilometers away. So they woke all of us up in the middle of the night and we made a bucket line, trying to put it out.

 

I was all the way at the front. You’ve ever been near a big fire?

 

_Never, fortunately._

 

It’s like nothing else. Fire is alive. It reaches out to you, tries to pull you in. Like a fat man, eating and eating. The only way to stay safe was to keep a hundred meters away. Otherwise, one wrong step and you’d be eaten up next. Like the boy inside.

 

_What happened to him?_

 

Burned to death. The fire was so sudden, got so hot, even his bones burnt to ashes. There wasn’t enough of a body left to give to his parents.

 

_That’s awful._

 

And I thought that's what it was like. Any spark could set it off. You didn’t even have to _do_ anything. Just a thought, and you’d be next. Going up in flames. And of course, I’d already done what I’d done to Yaroslav.

 

_I’m surprised you weren’t too afraid to do it._

 

I was. I was fucking terrified, but only after.

 

_After?_

 

It was the anger, again. Like blacking out.

 

_It was out of your control._

 

I could barely even stand to think about what I’d done. Yaroslav hadn’t been back in class since. Having to look at that empty desk…

 

I was vomiting every single day. I barely slept. Kept having nightmares.

 

And now he was standing in front of me, asking me this question, and I knew, I knew...

 

Of course I told him no. It was the only thing I could say.

 

_And Petr…?_

 

He just looked at me. Then he said, very quietly, “You know, it’s okay if you do.”

 

When he said that, I started crying. I never cried. But this time I was crying so hard I felt like I was going to puke. I couldn’t breathe. I was shaking. I knew he knew.

 

I asked him if I was going to Hell.

 

I remember he—

 

I was sitting at his desk. He was sitting on the bed. When I said that, he—pulled me over. Onto him. His lap. He told me to breathe. To breathe with him. He put my hand over his chest, so I could feel him breathing.

 

He told me things I’d never heard anyone say. He said that it was okay. He said if I were honest with God, I wouldn’t go to Hell. He said God knew me for myself, that He had created me and loved all of me, that He would guide me through this.

 

He kept talking and talking. I was clinging onto him, crying so much I could barely hear him. Then he started to put his hands up under my shirt.

 

He was moving them up and down my sides, the sides of my ribcage. I was so distracted that I think I stopped crying. I couldn’t remember ever being held by anyone. The Brothers only ever touched us to push us around, or to beat us. His hands felt so different than mine. They were huge. I remember wondering whether that was how my own hands would feel, when I was grown up.

 

Eventually, I came out of it. As soon as I could talk, I begged him not to tell anyone. He said, of course not. He said we’d work through these things together. Then he said he had a secret. He told me had struggled with the same thing I was.

 

That really shocked me. Kids never think anyone’s real outside of themself. I probably thought I was the first sinner in the history of man.

 

He told me, “You’re not alone.”

 

I think that was all I ever wanted to hear.

 

(PAUSE)

 

After that, things were never the same.

 

(STATIC)

 

It happened in his room. It always happened in his room.

 

I went to him. I _went_ to him. Every fucking time.

 

(STATIC)

 

—and we stayed there until my skin had gone pruney—

 

(STATIC)

 

—called me beautiful—

 

(STATIC)

 

—smell of books, the ink, it always… it still reminds me.

 

(STATIC)

 

—course, that was just the first time. We did all sorts of things, after that.

 

We kissed. We touched each other. He’d suck me off. I got off with him. Sometimes he’d even ask me to hit him. I liked that. Hitting an adult was fun. Sometimes he would put his face in my lap and cry. I didn’t like that. It made him look pathetic. Sometimes I would hit him and tell him to stop.

 

Why the face, Yagami? Don’t tell me you’re shocked. Did everyone else you talked to cry? Did they tell you how much it hurt?

 

You probably don’t want to hear this: he never held me down. He never forced me. He never fucking put a knife to me, like I had to Yaroslav. His door didn’t lock from the inside. I could’ve run away. I could’ve told on him. Hell, I could’ve just told him to stop and he probably would have.

 

Petr Ilina was nothing but a pathetic loser, a pedo who let a kid hit him in the face and got off on it.

 

I didn’t even understand until years later that something bad was meant to have happened to me. Something traumatic. What a fucking joke. At the time I didn’t even have any conception of what sex was.

 

I went to him.

 

I went to him.

 

I never said anything.

 

The things we did were just a game.

 

(STATIC)

 

—don’t remember the last time I saw him.

 

_What happened?_

 

They sent me away. Nobody ever told me why.

 

_When did this happen?_

 

When I was fourteen. I got sick. It was serious. I remember fainting in the middle of cleaning the floors. Later, the doctors told me I had fevers so high I had seizures.

 

I think they kept me in the abbey’s infirmary the first couple days, but I wasn’t getting better, so they had to take me to the hospital in town. They never took me back.

 

_They just left you there?_

 

I stayed in the hospital for two or three more weeks. Then I got put into the regular foster system. I never went back to the abbey again.

 

_Were you—happy to have left?_

 

In the beginning, I was just confused. No one would tell me what was happening. I hated the abbey, but it was all I knew. Anyway, foster care turned out to be worse. The first year after I left, that was the worst year of my life.

 

Still, it was probably for the better.

 

_Why?_

 

Before I left, he had started saying crazy shit. Talking about running away with me. Us traveling the world together. We could pretend I was sixteen, he said. He was fucking lovesick, like a fucking puppy.

 

I hated that, the most of all.

 

Maybe someone found out. Maybe that’s why they kicked me out.

 

_They weren’t afraid you would tell?_

 

Even if I did, who would believe me? Everybody knew foster kids were liars and thieves, and I was worse than most.

 

_Did you want to?_

 

Want to?

 

_Go with him? Run away?_

 

(PAUSE)

 

I don’t know.

 

I did want to run away. I wanted to leave the whole fucking world behind.

 

Maybe, if he had threatened to leave, with or without me.

 

(PAUSE)

 

At the first home they put me in, the family gave me a room on the second floor. It had a window that looked out on the road. In the beginning, I’d skip school, but I wouldn’t go anywhere—I’d just sneak back into the house through the fire escape and wait there, for hours, because I—

 

I was afraid if he came for me, and I was at school, he wouldn’t find know where to find me, and he’d just leave without me.

 

Christ, I was so fucking stupid.

 

He probably never even fucking knew where they’d placed me.

 

How could he? Even if he wanted to?

 

No, he was probably glad I was gone. His dirty secret taken care of. He was probably fucking relieved.

 

Still, I—

 

For a while, I thought about him.

 

(STATIC)

 

At night, I had started having these dreams. In my dreams the floor of the dorm would open up beneath me. It would open up clean in two, like splitting an orange in half, and I would hang on to the edge of my bed and look over, and I would see black that went on forever. Not a black like nighttime, or a shadow. More like a deep well, filled with dark, stagnant, water, a filmed-over water, that something had drowned in. A perfectly quiet, perfectly even black. The only thing that moved in that black was a voice, a little voice, that would come up, sometimes, from that blackness. A quiet voice. Barely a whisper. It would come up and I would hear it just behind my thoughts. Echoing. Like someone who would start talking whenever you started, and stop when you stopped, so you could never really hear what they said. But even though I couldn’t understand what it was saying, I knew what it was. The echoing that no one else heard. The footsteps in my footsteps. The Devil spoke to me at night. I was damned.

 

(STATIC)

 

_You considered him your friend?_

 

He was my only friend.

 

(STATIC)

 

Why are we still doing this?

 

_Do you want to stop?_

 

You and I both know you won’t win with this.

 

_What is “this”?_

 

This, all this—fucking shit.

 

I’ve seen this kind of thing before. I know how people are. Your jurors will want some fucking baby lamb. They want to cry over some little hurt thing who’s lost everything.

 

_And you’ve lost nothing?_

 

(LAUGH)

 

You tell me, Yagami. What’ve I lost? I’m still gay. Still Catholic. I fuck guys every day of the week and go to Mass on Sundays. Same as it ever was.

 

_Have you considered that maybe, it’s a testament to you that you do, despite what happened to you?_

 

What _happened_ to me?

 

No, no, fuck that. It’s not that simple.

 

_Ilina was a predator. He was twenty-seven when you were twelve._

 

And now you’re mad.

 

_Well, I'm not sorry. Can you blame me?_

 

Unbelievable. How many hours we’ve been here, and you still don’t understand.

 

_What don’t I understand?_

 

 _Me_ , you don’t understand _me_. Goddamnit, I’ve tried to be honest with you, I’ve tried to tell this thing straight, and you sit here and listen and nod, and at the end you fucking flatten this out into _he was a predator and you were the victim?_

 

I loved him. Put that in your damn report.

 

_I’m not saying—_

 

_What happened wasn’t simple. Not with you, not with anyone else. It never is. I’m not questioning you on that._

 

_But that doesn’t change what I’ve said. He was twenty-seven._

 

I know how old he was. Will you ask me what I think should happen to him?

 

_What should happen to him?_

 

He should go to jail. He should burn. I’m not delusional, Yagami. I understand what happened.

 

_You can understand something without accepting it._

 

What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

 

_Mello. Listen to yourself._

 

Fuck off, then. Find yourself a better victim. No one will cry at the sight of me.

 

_There are no good victims, Mello. Do you understand that?_

 

_… Mello?_

 

_All right. Let’s… That’s enough._

 

_Let’s stop. For today._

 

(STATIC)

 

(STATIC)

 

(STATIC)


	3. Blood on the Molar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read the tags. Tags will be added as the story progresses.

What could Matt say?

 

He, lying on Astrid’s bed, his fingers moving in her cunt, her hands locked around his throat. Barely listening as she tells him to _focus for this part_ _;_ she tells him to count, he does, distracted.

 

“One. Two.”

 

Matt’s phone buzzes twice on her nightstand. It could be Mello. He’s been avoiding him. Mello never used to text him first. Matt never used to avoid him.

 

“Three.”

 

His phone goes silent. Astrid’s hands flex as Matt crooks a finger inside her.

 

“Four.”

 

What could Matt say, to explain what he did?

 

He could give you excuses. Plead on his knees. Try to make you understand how low he gets, sometimes; how much it scares him, the depths he goes.

 

“Five. Six.”

 

He could tell you about the time half a year after he and Xinlei broke up, when she texted him a photo of her cut-up wrists as he lay in this very room.

 

How he’d politely excused himself into Astrid’s bathroom and locked it and struggled for hours not to put her curling iron to his arm, as Astrid moved gently around in the room outside, waiting for him to stop crying. How he had tried and failed until the sun had gone down and her fiance arrived home, and the low murmur of their voices had risen from the floor below and slapped Matt awake at last, driven him hurrying down her fire escape.

 

“Seven…”

 

He feels a little dizzy. It’s difficult to keep his hands moving. He has to. She shouldn’t have to do all the work, rocking over him like wave over shore. The need to apologize rises low and hot in his belly.

 

“Focus.”

 

“M’fine. Eight.”

 

Or, alternatively, fuck explanations. Fuck pleading.

 

Matt does the things he does because he wants the pain to stop. It’s a natural thing, an animal thing. That’s it. That’s always been it.

 

Is that too fucking much to ask?

 

“Nine.”

 

“Still with me?”

 

 _Yes,_ he thinks. His tongue touching the tip of ten. He floats.

 

_Of course it’s too much._

 

In darkness, it comes to him:

 

What you’ve done is not natural. You are not an animal. You are not in pain. You hurt people. You hurt Mello.

 

“Matt?”

 

You are a bad person.

 

He sinks into black. Waits for a release he doesn’t deserve.

 

()

 

Matt winds bandages round and round his neck.

 

He just needs to tell him.

 

How he found out because he watched the video, because he broke into Yagami’s apartment and stole it, because he wanted evidence that they were fucking, which is a problem because Matt was jealous because Matt wants to be dating and Matt wants Mello to himself and Matt cannot handle Mello sleeping with other people but Matt is too much of a pussy to confront him or to confront them or to let him go.

 

Matt would do this, if he were a good person. Matt would say all this. _We need to talk_. It’s just four words.

 

Matt is scum.

 

He checks his phone. It is Mello who texted him.

 

Him: [tuesday.]

 

Matt: [im busy tuesday]

 

Mello: [at 3am? busy with what?]

 

Matt: [idk man maybe sleep]

 

Matt: [do not fucking come over]

 

Matt: [i s2g]

 

()

 

Matt loses Tuesday to a haze of anxiety even weed can’t smother. Mello does not appear on Tuesday. Instead Matt wakes up in the dead of night four days later to the clicking of his lock being picked. He bolts up just in time for Mello to come rolling through his door with pupils like marbles, backing Matt up until he’s got him pressed hip-to-hip hard into the edge of his own kitchen counter.

 

“Jesus fucking christ,” breathes Matt. “You’re lucky I don’t keep a gun.”

 

Mello ignores him. “What’re you looking so guilty for? You haven’t done anything.”

 

“The fuck’re you talking about?” Matt says, heart bashing in his throat. The adrenaline pumps him up, gives him the bravery to tell Mello, “Fuck you.”

 

Mello smiles nastily, shoves him down with his left hand, reaches for his fly with the right. The thin circular scar marring his palm is barely visible in the low light.

 

_You know how they taught us about Hell?_

 

“Whatever it is,” he says, “make it up to me.”

 

Then, doubt creeps about him. All those times, on his knees, mouth and mind full of him, Matt thinks, it can’t have been Mello. Mello, who loves men, who loves god. Who loves sex. Who thrives off these things.

 

Who is so strong, so sure of everything he does that Matt builds his life in the wake of his ever-forwards tow.

 

Meanwhile Mello is yanking him to his feet, shoving him facedown over the counter amongst his own trash, spare change and takeout boxes. Matt closes his eyes, feeling Mello’s belt trail over his ass.

 

_Sometimes he’d ask me to hit him._

 

_I liked that._

 

Matt wants not to want this. Matt is so hard it almost hurts.

 

“Where’s your head at?”

 

Mello sounds angry. He probably is. This wouldn’t be the first time. Let him work it out on him. Let him chew him to pieces. If it would ease him, even by an inch—

 

“Mel—”

 

He breaks off, feeling leather tighten around his throat. Oh. That’s new.

 

“Focus,” Mello says.

 

In the end Matt comes with Mello’s belt wrapped around him. It kind of hurts. The buckle is sharp, cuts into him. It clinks onto the counter as Mello pulls off him and fucks off into Matt’s shower without another word.

 

After a moment, Matt sits up gingerly. He touches the little cut on his neck. Mello never asks before doing these things. It’s hot as fuck, but also, sometimes, just a tiny bit scary.

 

When Mello comes out, he’s fully armored: in black, fingers ringed. He still hasn’t said anything. Matt watches him spin the ring on his middle finger with his thumb, glancing at the door. He seems to sense Matt staring then, turns to look at him. Matt glances down immediately, fiddling with the hem of his boxers.

 

Mello is tripping him out. This fucking silence. Matt can’t handle it.

 

He knows exactly what he shouldn’t say. He can’t stop himself from asking it anyway, very quietly, like that’s some compromise: “Are you mad at me?”

 

“Goddamnit,” Mello snaps. He reaches suddenly towards him. Matt flinches, but it’s just to grab the belt, which he pulls back on so fast it hisses, its end cracking the air.

 

“You know this doesn’t mean anything.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“It was too much?”

 

“No.”

 

“You’ll tell me if it’s too much.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I’m not going to keep doing this with you if you can’t handle it.”

 

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

 

“You’re being weird. What is it?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

He notices him touching the cut and pushes Matt’s hand away. “Does that hurt?”

 

“It’s fine.”

 

“Matt.”

 

“It’s fine, dude, seriously. Fuck off.”

 

“Go fuck yourself. Does this gonorrhea-ridden shithole have any band-aids?”

 

“It’s probably your fucking gonorrhea.”

 

“Mouthy bitch.”

 

“Dickhead.”

 

Mello comes back with a box of band-aids. Stands between Matt’s knees and pushes his chin to the side.

 

“Stop moving.”

 

Matt stops. Watches him slit open the wrapper with the sharp pinky nail of his right hand.

 

Astrid used to never do this for him unless he asked. Babying him afterwards, all that shit. That was a rule with her, that he had to communicate what he wanted, like a real fucking adult. It wasn’t her fault he almost never did. That the point-five-percent chance she’d lay into him for asking or laugh at him or shove him to the floor, mock him, never, in his fucked-up brain, added up to a worthwhile gamble for him.

 

There are, he thinks, some benefits to him and Mello’s not talking. The shifting winds of Mello’s moods are a surer thing than Matt himself has ever been.

 

Mello inspects the band-aid on his fingertip. “Pikachu, seriously?”

 

“Let me wallow in my nineties nostalgia.”

 

“Childish.”

 

“Come on. They didn’t have Pokemon in Russia?”

 

The look Mello levels at him is an arrow between the eyes. He draws away from him. Matt knows it for the punishment it is. Fuck. He’s been too bold. Riding that post-fuck high.

 

That’s a line, for Mello. That Mello has no history, comes from nowhere or at least from Los Angeles, his faint incurable accent be damned.

 

Well, Matt understands the need for that now, doesn’t he?

 

He shivers with guilt. He wants Mello to come back, close enough so Matt can mouth apologies into his shoulder where he’ll never hear them, feed him silent confessions tongue-to-tongue.

 

He needs to tell him what he knows.

 

_I loved him._

 

What Matt knows: that Mello would never forgive him.

 

What Matt says: nothing but “sorry”, mumbled with his eyes lowered. Waiting for the favor of Mello’s touch.

 

()

 

Matt doesn’t watch the tape again. Doesn’t speak of it either. Matt may be bad, but Mello makes it easy. He’s getting too busy to even come around Matt’s place anymore, at three in the night or otherwise. Instead he’ll text Matt to come down to the studio on the thinnest of pretenses and fuck him in a bathroom stall that’s seen so many fuckings it watches theirs with eyes half-closed. There’s no room for conversation, barely room for sex. Mello’s people will wander in and out, complaining, demanding Mello get the fuck back to work as Mello curses them and Matt muffles himself desperately in his forearm, his knee banging repetitively into the toilet lid.

 

When Mello finishes with him, he retreats immediately back into a recording room. Matt follows more slowly. He looks in through the window at him. Surrounded by people who love him is always how Mello looks best. On a stage, in a club. In this room, where the air must smell headily of creation like wine. The pack’s eyes gleam, their color high. Mello has his arm slung easily around a boy’s neck, his hand in someone else’s pocket as they all lean laughing over a table.

 

It is hard to imagine him ever being lonely.

 

_He was my only friend._

 

Is he lonely?

 

On the stage, on the bedsheets, or while passing the blunt, passing glances, keeping time as he plays, glancing blows in a boxing ring, or while dancing among the thickset eyes, debating melodies viciously, howling with laughter, or waking next to one lover, and then another, and another, and never being known, not once, not ever?

 

On the other hand: what a killing thing it is to be known. Matt has been. He couldn’t survive it twice.

 

Through the window, Mello glances at him.

 

Matt raises his hand before he leaves.

 

()

 

Next time.

 

He will tell him next time.

 

()

 

He doesn’t see Mello again for a long while. When he does, he’s worse for wear.

 

“Fucking hell—”

 

Three weeks he’s been gone, and now Matt finds him tripping in his bathroom. Half of Matt’s mirror is on the floor or in Mello’s knuckles. Little pieces of glass like claws. More of Matt’s shit broken.

 

“What’d the hell’d you take? Acid?” Matt touches the bare wall exposed behind the broken mirror. A mess of ants swarms across its surface.

 

Mello is gone, gone, gone. Trembling visibly.

 

“Your hands—”

 

“Don’t touch me.”

 

“You’re tripping, man. You’re super fucked up, and you need to go to the hospital. I’ll drive you.”

 

“Leave me alone.”

 

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

 

Mello growls at him. Like a dog.

 

“Then let me at least look at your hands, you fucking bitch.”

 

“Don’t touch me,” he warns again.

 

Matt reaches forwards anyway and Mello shouts and throws his arms out. Matt falls. He hits the floor with a hard, flat sound, like a sack of meat. All his air pummeling out of him, like the cloud of dust that rises when you beat a carpet with a broom.

 

He stays down. Shifting gingerly amongst the glass. He’s afraid to put his hand down to get himself up again.

 

Very calmly, he says, “Man, you need to dry the fuck out.”

 

()

 

Mello doesn’t have drug trouble.

 

Mello has drug trouble. He’s high functioning and a genius and brooks not a millimeter of discussion on it, so nobody calls him out. Mostly, it’s fine. He still comes to gigs on time, still writes songs nobody can touch. Sobers up for service on Sundays.

 

It being fine doesn’t change the fact that sometimes, he doesn’t control it, it controls him.

 

Lately, he is high all the fucking time, which is one thing, but it’s another thing when he takes too much at once. Then it’s him destroying Matt’s shit, or getting arrested for DUIs, or being thrown out of bars for fighting, or worst of all getting into those deadly moods where he’ll drive himself into the hills where the wildfires rage just to feel the sparks shiver on him.

 

Matt wakes briefly as he crawls into his bed, smelling of ash.

 

Most of the time when Mello takes too much he is a goddamn nightmare. Sometimes, he’s actually easier to manage. Like tonight, where he swallows Ambien like eating candy and goes down like a comma on Matt’s bed, deep asleep in a way Matt knows hasn’t come natural to him in years.

 

Matt curls up around him, folds him hot and pliant into his arms. Some of the warmth of the fire seems to cling to him. He buries his face in his neck, feeling blonde hair slide in his mouth. God. There’s something about holding someone smaller than him. A crying feeling tickling the back of his throat. Matt could lie like this forever.

 

It never lasts. Mello kicks away as soon as he wakes, still groggy.

 

“What time is it?”

 

“Who cares?”

 

“Fuck, I slept for four hours?”

 

“That can’t be enough.”

 

“It’s too much.”

 

“You shouldn’t drive yet, man. Wait for the meds to wear off.”

 

“They’ve worn off.”

 

Matt grabs him by the wrist. “You’re staggering around like a day-drunk housewife,” he says quietly.

 

See, Mello isn’t the only one with bad habits. Matt has a mouth on him. A throat full of fighting words. He picks at his partners like a hangnail, goads them into giving him what he deserves. It always worked with Xinlei. He still feels bad about that, how easily he could stir her to rage. Astrid, on the other hand, had never let him get away with it. “Don’t try to manipulate me,” she would tell him. “You don’t control this scene. I do.” It’s part of the reason they didn’t last, although Matt doesn’t like to think about it: that he cannot be with a person whose anger he cannot use.

 

 _I had this anger, always had it,_ Mello had said. It is something Matt knows well, the ebb and rise of it, a moon to Mello’s tide, Matt driftwood on his sea.

 

Up to this point, Mello has not treated him badly. Up to this point, Matt hasn’t pushed him to.

 

The gaze Mello turns on him is like a heated iron. Matt pushes the fear down ruthlessly. He doesn’t let go. Mello may be much fitter than Matt, but Matt has half a foot and nearly forty pounds on him. When Matt puts his weight into it, Mello goes nowhere.

 

“Are you fucking serious?”

 

Matt can feel Mello’s wrist flexing in his hand as it clenches. “Half an hour,” Matt says.

 

“Fuck you. Let go.”

 

When Matt doesn’t, Mello hauls back and kicks him just above his left kneecap so hard that Matt sees stars. Mello is wearing his boots. Huh. He must’ve fallen asleep with them on.

 

Matt lets go. Mello is up in his face. “You don’t think I see what you’re doing? Huh?” he snarls. Matt stumbles backwards, his left leg howling. He falls onto the bed, and Mello crawls over him, his long nails in Matt’s jaw, spitting at him, “You want me to fuck with you?”

 

Matt looks him dead in the eye and says, “Sometimes.”

 

“You fucking freak,” he hears Mello say. Matt closes his eyes. _There it is._

 

“Maybe you should check out rehab,” he says, and Mello slams his door shut so hard an ashtray teeters off the edge of Matt’s coffee table and shatters into bits.

 

()

 

He breaks into Matt’s apartment three days later with a fifth of vodka, the stuff Matt likes that’ll bleach your teeth right to the eye, and they drink half of it and smoke a bowl and fuck in the lowlight afternoon, where he kisses all round the ripening bruise on Matt’s leg.

 

()

 

Mello calls him from the side of the freeway and tells him to pick him up.

 

It takes Matt over an hour to get there, crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic until he sees the smoke trailing from the wreck of Mello’s car.

 

Mello climbs into his Jeep with blood in his hairline and empty eyes. Matt gets things started with, “If you’re trying to commit suicide, don’t phone me about it next time,” and they’re fighting within seconds, peeling the paint right off Matt’s car:

 

Mello: “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

 

Him: “What the fuck is wrong with _you_?”

 

“Your bitch-ass attitude’s one problem, and in case you didn’t know, I’m working on this fucking thing—”

 

“Yeah, but let’s be real for a second, you’d be living this fucking, this train wreck of a fucking life even if you couldn’t pull a talent out of your ass to save your life—”

 

“Like you, you mean?”

 

That one hurts. Matt has to sit on his hand to keep from pinching himself. Not because it matters what he does to himself, but because Mello would see it and he would laugh, would use it against him. The way he is right now—Matt knows he would.

 

“Fuck off, Mihael,” he says.

 

There is a long silence. Matt knows instantly he has said not just the wrong thing, but the worst possible thing. He has a talent for that.

 

“You know what?” Mello says. “That’s a good idea. I’ll go find Yagami.”

 

And he opens the passenger-side door straight into the eighty-an-hour flow of the fast lane as Matt yells and swears, slamming on his brakes; rolls right out into a cloud of burning rubber and limps away.

 

()

 

“Focus, Matt.”

 

He doesn’t focus. He doesn’t even try to count. Without a word he lets Astrid choke him until he blacks out. He wakes up just a couple seconds later, but it’s too late. The scene is over. He knows the extent to which she is comfortable going with him. He has pushed them both far over that line.

 

He apologizes to her. She tells him to leave.

 

()

 

He comes home and Mello is waiting.

 

He’s just sitting there. No pretense of doing anything. Arms crossed, legs open. Spinning the ring on his middle finger with his thumb.

 

“Hey.”

 

Mello doesn’t reply.

 

“Okay…”

 

He turns to fumble in the fridge for a coke. He can tell Mello’s staring at his neck. His pretty collar of bruises, ripening like fruit. Matt ignores him. As the door swings shut, Mello says:

 

“Have fun?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Matt walks out of the kitchen and puts one foot into the hallway and stops, and then steps back out and swings around. Goes back into the kitchen.

 

“What’s this, like… bitchy girlfriend act?”

 

He’s standing behind Mello now, so he can’t see his expression when he says, “Care to explain that?”

 

His voice is a cobra with its hood up. That’s what Matt is doing: taunting a snake. He should walk away.

 

“Never mind.”

 

_Walk away like you do from everything._

 

“I mean, I just hope you realize you fuck other people, like. All the fucking time. So I don’t get why, when I do it, it’s all—this.”

 

“It’s different.”

 

“How’s it different? Because you’re famous and I’m not? Because, because you’re better looking than me? You deserve it?”

 

“It’s different,” he says, “because you don’t enjoy it.”

 

“No, see—yeah. Yeah, I do, Mello. You’re not the only fucking one for me. Okay?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Never have been.”

 

Mello does get up, then. He pushes his chair in gently and turns to look at Matt and instantly Matt is paralyzed. The muscles of his calves twitching sporadically, firing for escape, but it’s like his feet are concrete. Like his veins have grown out of his skin, rooted him deep into the earth

 

Mello closes in on him.

 

This is how rabbits feel. He is a deer, a field mouse. How the fuck did he let it get to this? He should’ve kept his mouth shut, he should’ve—

 

Mello runs one hand between his legs. Presses up, hard.

 

Matt chokes an animal sound. He hardly recognizes himself.

 

“Mello—”

 

Mello shoves him backwards. The two of them making an ugly four-legged shadow on the wall. A beast’s shadow.

 

Stumbling towards the bedroom: _I don’t,_ Matt thinks, _we shouldn’t_ , but all he manages to say is, “Please.”

 

Mello does not say anything. Mello does not stop.

 

()

 

It is very early in the morning. Mello’s still asleep. Matt sits on the cold lid of the toilet, smoking.

 

He is remembering a night, three years ago. It was Halloween. Mello was trying half-heartedly to convince him to go out; Matt was half-heartedly resisting. The two of them bickering in their boxers, stoned and sticky-hot, drunk, flinging tacky costumes at one another from the bin of them Mello had impulse-bought.

 

At some point Mello had thrown a Marilyn Monroe getup at him: white dress, lipstick, a curly wig the color of mayonnaise and the texture of straw.

 

Matt giggled so hard he snorted, the edibles hitting in full force by then: “Brave choice. Don’t blame me if you’re traumatized.”

 

Mello flopped facefirst onto the sliding heap of cheap fabric on the bed. “Can’t be worse than anything I’ve seen already.”

 

“Wow, thanks, man.”

 

In the bathroom the mirror looked dark and moving, a pool of worms. Matt held hard onto the edge of the counter. Traced a tremulous smear of red around his mouth. The wig was incredibly scratchy, the dress smooth and slightly cold, like snake skin.

 

“I look like a whore,” he said as he stepped out. “I fucked up the lip stuff pretty b…”

 

Mello staring; Matt’s heart in his throat.

 

“… what?”

 

And then Mello had pulled him over and they had had sex, sex that frightened Matt with its intensity. That almost wasn’t pleasurable because it was too much, became something you didn’t have the luxury to enjoy, but something that you needed. Enjoyable only in the way a drowning man’s first gasp of air was enjoyable; pleasurable like water poured on a burning wound. Mello drove into him like Matt was some container that he was pouring an enormous energy into, an energy he could no longer safely contain himself. That needed to be dispersed into Matt like draining poison.

 

It was too much. Too fast. It tripped Matt out, and in the middle he had broken and said, “Stop, Mel,” pleading, “slow down, I can’t, I can’t—I need—”

 

But Mello had pulled off that time. Stilling, the two of them still locked together. Feeling one another’s bodies pant.

 

“Jesus. I thought you didn’t like women,” breathed Matt, trying to lighten the mood. Admiring his lipstick all over Mello’s mouth.

 

“I don’t. You’re not a woman. You’re a man.”

 

“In a dress.”

 

“Mm.” Mello pulled down one side of the halter top, put his mouth to Matt’s nipple. “Always in dresses.” And then, unexpectedly: “Christ, you don’t know how you look.”

 

That had, weirdly, started tears pricking at the corners of Matt’s eyes, and then Mello had laughed at him, and when they resumed, the insane, warped energy of before had already dissipated, like smoke in wind.

 

In some ways what happened last night was so much less debauched. No lipstick, no dress, no handcuffs or ropes. But for the first time, the only time, Matt hadn’t wanted it—or at least he hadn’t been sure. And it had scared him, the way he had shut down, voluntarily, in the face of Mello’s will. Like a fucking prey animal.

 

It scares him what he will let Mello do to keep him.

 

Fuck Mello, he thinks, fuck Mello, fuck Mello. I am a fucking person. People don’t treat each other this way.

 

(And also: How could you, of all people… how could you?)

 

He hears footsteps. He goes back out. Mello is in the kitchen, drinking from the tap.

 

He’s naked still, and the light of the morning perches on his bones and casts shadows from the heights of his shoulder-blades, his spine, the deep cleft of the arch of his lower back. His tattoos a flock of birds swirling over his back.

 

And as he turns to face Matt the light uncovers planes on planes of him like turning the pages of a book: the sea-foam veins frothing in his arms. The pits and stripes of his scars scattered like stray wipes of a fountain pen. The little white bands of untanned skin around the bases of his fingers, the tiny tattoos lurking in the webs of them. And his eyes as they lock into Matt’s. Their irises so light they look sub-human.

 

He is beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful creature Matt has ever seen.

 

“I think—”

 

Matt clears his throat. Starts over.

 

“You need to go.”

 

Mello just looks at him.

 

It starts a frisson in his chest. Matt wants to be alone. When he’s alone he can scream, and then nobody will hear him, nobody will care.

 

“Mello. Get out,” he says.

 

Mello leaves.

 

()

 

It stretches. Two weeks and Matt doesn’t talk to anyone, Matt doesn’t leave the house. Lets takeout boxes build into grand, teetering structures against his walls. He codes a little, smokes a lot. Plays games he’s played before, 8-bit RPGs.

 

Two weeks to four. The air conditioning breaks again. He lies naked at midnight in a rictus of sweat. Clinging and clinging to the knees of his anger. Lying facedown in the dregs of it as it drains, like a man trying to drown himself in six inches of water.

 

He will not text him. He will not _fucking_ text him.

 

But then sleep will steal in and rob him of his will, holding him at gunpoint with dreams of Mello, coming in with the vodka, and them not talking, taking three shots each in silence, and then three more, and then Mello’s hand down his pants and then him on his knees, tasting him on his furred tongue. Nothing having changed, nothing ever changing.

 

He wakes limp with sweat. There’s a truck rumbling outside and someone pounding on his door.

 

“Matthew Jeevas?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Sign here, please.”

 

“No, wait. For what? What the fuck?” He stares in disbelief at the stuff on the sidewalk. Guitars and keyboards and more guitars and some huge box covered with knobs, bleeding wires onto the pavement.

 

“This isn’t my shit.”

 

“You know another Matthew Jeevas that lives around here?” Sweat bubbles on the delivery man’s hairy lip. Matt can smell it, rising from both of them like the scent of water. “Listen buddy, you can sign for it or not. It’s nothing personal to me.”

                  

“I don’t want it.”

 

“Who gives a shit? Just leave it here then.” He nudges a case with his boot. “Looks valuable. It’ll probably be gone in minutes.”

 

“You won’t take it back?”

 

“ _Me,_ take it back? To where?”

 

Matt hesitates. He sees a couple of his neighbors’ kids poking their heads out of the upstairs windows, staring.

 

“I’m on the clock here, friend. I got—”

 

“Okay, okay, here. Signed. Okay?”

 

“Alright then. You gonna need help carrying that up?”

 

Matt declines him. It takes him a dozen trips to move everything into his apartment. Each time he comes back down, he kind of hopes somebody’ll have stolen something. Nobody steals anything.

 

()

 

Matt’s apartment has no room to accommodate anyone else’s shit. He accommodates anyway. Story of his goddamn life. He mashes guitars into closets and under his bed. Balances one on top of his refrigerator.

 

Even stripped down to his boxers, every movement triggers a wash of sweat like hives. He wipes his forehead on his arm, which does nothing but smear sweat from one place to the other. He thinks about taking a video of himself smashing Mello’s pretty whore-red double-necked bass and texting it to him.

 

Instead he takes a photo of the synth, hulking like a beached whale on Matt’s coffee table—

 

[get your shit out or its going on ebay in a week]

 

—and immediately powers his phone off and throws into some corner of the room, because he is not going to allow himself to fucking sit around checking it every thirty seconds for a response.

 

Of course, a bowl or two later he’s on his hands and knees looking for the damn thing, getting distracted every five seconds by some crusty unidentifiable thing on his carpet. It’s a goddamn seascape down there. He crawls past the red bass twice and flips it the bird.

 

There, fucking christ. He waits an eternity for it to power back on before scrabbling through his texts. No response. But also, the message hasn’t even been marked delivered. Which means Mello has his phone off, or is somewhere with no signal, or… something.

 

Really, it wouldn’t be a fucking problem, except for the fucking way Mello has been recently. When was the last time Matt saw him sober?

 

He thinks about him screaming around town in his black widebody Hellcat after he wrecked his black widebody Mustang. The lethal acceleration on that thing.

 

He wouldn’t put _dead in a ditch_ past him. It wouldn’t be difficult at all.

 

()

 

He wakes up six times that night, checks six times if the text has gone through. It hasn’t. It still scratches at him the next morning, even though it, like so much of Mello’s shit, is probably ultimately meaningless.

 

Christ, _fuck_ Mello. Matt needs to get out of his fucking head.

 

He decides to go out.

 

He hasn’t been back on campus in years. He has to ask for directions half a dozen times. Everyone is fast-walking and good-looking, pointing him affably down walkways and around libraries.

 

Inside the physics building it’s different. The sunshine falls away. The air is musty and the people are musty. Fluorescent track lighting dribbles a coating of lime-tinted white over everything. In the distance, ceiling fans strain and mumble.

 

Matt look up _River_ on the directory; goes up to the fourth floor. The door of his office is open, but Matt knocks anyway.

 

“Come in.”

 

“Hey.”

 

Near doesn’t even look up from the monitor on his desk. “What is it?”

 

“It’s me.”

 

“Yes, Matt, I know.”

 

“Am I inconvenient?”

 

“I have a lecture in ten minutes.”

 

“Afterwards?”

 

“After is—fine.”

 

“Can I come with?”

 

“Afraid I’ll run off?”

 

Matt shrugs. “Not really. Just I’ve never seen you teach.”

 

“I’ve heard it’s no treat.”

 

“Do you like it?”

 

“No, but unfortunately the department requires it.” Near unfolds himself from his chair, edging around the desk and then Matt without ever quite looking at him. Pausing just outside the door, he says shortly, “Are you coming?”

 

The lecture hall is small. It must be a grad-level course; most of the thirty-odd people there look around Matt’s age. That makes Near the youngest person in the room. Of course, he’s probably used to that by now.

 

Matt takes a seat at the back and promptly zones out. He almost never attended classes when he was in college; it’s a miracle he graduated at all. Anyway, it’s not like he understands a word of this lecture. He watches the students watch Near. It’s true that he isn’t a very accommodating teacher. He speaks softly and almost tonelessly, his words weaving over and under the non-stop scratching of chalk. He doesn’t adjust his pace and he doesn’t slow down. The woman sitting closest to Matt seems afraid to even take time to scratch her nose. He’s fairly sure he hasn’t seen her blink yet.

 

“Professor, I was—”

 

“Questions after class.”

 

When he’s filled one of the chalkboards completely, he has to get up on a chair to roll it up and pull an empty one down. Matt smiles at this, although no one else does.

 

He’s always liked Near a lot. He’s kind of an asshole, but not in Mello’s snarling duster-ring way. More like an alien that crash landed on Earth and is not-so-patiently waiting to get rescued from this primitive planet.

 

It was maybe inevitable that he and Mello detested each other in college. They still do. Well, Mello does, at least. He’ll bring him up out of the blue. Sneering at whatever latest sliver of truth Near has chipped out as he mines away in the freezing outer orbits of human knowledge. Particle physics; the study of the very small. In Mello’s eyes, Near’s hours are small, his life small. The Virgin, he had called him, meanly.

 

As for Near, he finds Mello’s decision to pursue music completely incomprehensible. There is a hint of real pain in his voice whenever he talks about him. Mello was gold that slipped through Near’s fingers. Finer than gold—his intellect. A prodigy, like Near. And spent on what? Writing brainless songs? Beats?

 

Probably, they both wanted the same thing. Wished more than anything that the other was a colleague in his chosen field. Striving against one another, elbow-by-elbow, the heights they could’ve had! Apart, they were chemicals without a catalyst, unfulfilled.

 

Still, it’s probably for the best. Matt can’t speak for Near, but Mello’d definitely go for the jugular if he had to work with Near for more than a day.

 

The clock passes the hour. Near underlines something on the board, and the lecture is over. The tension goes out of the room like a rubber band relaxing. Several people roll their wrists.

 

Matt trails a small posse of students to the front of the room. Even the shortest of them still has several inches on Near. They look like adults clustered around a lost child. Matt has to bite his lip to keep from laughing.

 

He’s happy to wait, but two minutes into talking with the first student Near seems to catch sight of him hovering at the back of the group, and breaks off mid-sentence. “Oh,” he says flatly. The group slowly shambles about. Together they take in Matt.

 

“Hi. We’re—I’m Matt. Old friend.” He gets a smattering of _heys_ and _hi_.

 

“I’m busy,” Near says to the group.

 

“I can wait,” says Matt, but Near is already walking towards the door. “Sorry,” Matt says to the students. “Get his number or something.”

 

“I don’t have a phone.”

 

“Joking. Bye guys. Nice meeting you.”

 

They go to a cafe on campus that sells really bomb milkshakes. He’s been here with Mello before, had to suffer through him doing subtle and obscene things with tongue and cream and glass rim that to this day Matt is unsure were intentional or unconscious. The effect with Near is the polar opposite; he holds the giant glass with both hands when he drinks and looks about twelve years old.

 

“How’re things?” asks Matt.

 

“Fine.”

 

“You seem—good. Your students like you a lot.”

 

“They haven’t taken my exam yet.”

 

“Come on, man. They’ll like you more after. You’re what they’re here for.”

 

Near shrugs. “I’m indifferent. Many come, most go. A few might contribute something valuable someday. It’s the work that matters.”

 

“I think I shocked the hell out of them today.”

 

“How so?”

 

“Because I said we were friends.”

 

“Perhaps.”

 

“And here we are, getting drinks together. In public. You harlot.”

 

“I? How is Mello?”

 

“Oh, you know,” Matt says, aiming hard for lightness. “Still wasting his life. Miss him?”

 

“Sometimes. You’re still in contact with him?”

 

“Uh huh,” he says vaguely. “Can I, uh, ask you something, like, hypothetical?”

 

“It depends. Is there any way we can fast-forward to you admitting it isn’t?”

 

“Humor me, will you? Do you have any secrets?”

 

“Are we still speaking hypothetically? Or are you trying for whatever reason to obtain blackmail material on me?”

 

“ _Is_ there material?”

 

Near snorts. “In the interests of the hypothesis, I’ll say yes.”

 

“Okay, thanks. Imagine I, like, found out, your biggest, worst secret. Something just… god awful. You know. Let’s say I find out, by accident, however, it doesn’t matter. But you don’t know that I know. Would you want me to tell you?”

 

“I don’t think it would be wise to tell Mello.”

 

“Who said this was about him?”

 

“Isn’t everything?”

 

“That’s either very mean of you or very generous.”

 

“I’ll leave you to take a guess as to which. Mello does not have much forgiveness in him. And you don’t have the strength to not be forgiven.”

 

“Ouch.”

 

“Then I’ll put aside your delicate feelings and focus on him. I find it difficult to imagine that Mello would forgive any person who breaks his trust, even, I think, if that person is you. So the alternative is—”

 

“Lying.”

 

“I never said it was the better choice. It’s what you can live with.”

 

“But it’s wrong.”

 

“Only fools die on principles. Life is filthy and rarely fair, and then usually only incidentally. You are how old?”

 

“Twenty six.”

 

“Old enough to know this.”

 

“How old are you?”

 

“Twenty two.”

 

“You’re the most terrifying twenty-two year old I’ve ever met.”

 

“Am I supposed to thank you for that?”

 

“If you think it’s a compliment.”

 

Near says nothing to that, but he smiles, just a little, at the edges.

 

()

 

One of Mello’s friends comes trawling around in a Porsche and a fog of cologne, asking about the instruments. Matt should give them up. Instead he stonewalls him. Steps outside and closes the door behind him and asks him why the hell Mello would be sending him that crap, anyway.

 

This is how Matt finds out Mello got kicked out of his studio for stomping the shit out of some pop starlet’s boyfriend. Apparently Mello had given some rather pointed criticism on her singing, and then had, with his natural gift of escalating everything to the fucking brink, chosen to defend his point with his fists when her date took offense. Not that anybody gave a shit about how many places the boyfriend’s nose was broken in, but they’d really wanted the singer for a song they were shopping around. Needless to say, she hadn’t come back.

 

“And then, uh, we came in like a couple days later and, like, a lot of our shit was missing…”

 

Matt shrugs. “That’s rough.”

 

“Word, man, word…”

 

It’s clear the man’s not satisfied. Matt lets the silence stretch. “Aight, bro,” he says finally. “You sure you haven’t heard anything?”

 

“Nope. Sorry.”

 

“You know where he is? Nobody’s been able to get a fucking hold of him.”

 

“No clue.”

 

The man spits. “Fuck that faggoty cunt. Thinks he’s hot shit. Maybe he is, but he’s not worth the trouble, y’know?”

 

“Sure,” says Matt. “Have a nice day.”

 

()

 

He sends a second text:

 

[met one of your friends today nice guy kind of seems like a homophobic asshole. they want their shit back]

 

[idk might be tempted to clean house someday]

 

He watches his screen for three minutes after he hits send. The message is not delivered.

 

Mello gets called that a lot: faggot. It doesn’t ever seem to bother him. It always bothers Matt. The only fight Matt has been in post-junior high was because of this. It was Mello’s twenty-third birthday, a fucking rager that had crawled from bar to bar to bar before flaming out in a massive dive bar as Matt teetered towards blackout drunk.

 

He barely remembers the guy who said it. He does remember putting the toe of his shoe into him over and over and hating how fucking soft he felt. It was disgusting, like stepping on some clear gelatinous insect.

 

Then the barkeep was yelling at him. Mello was yelling at him. Matt hadn’t stopped, barely cared, and then Mello had hauled back and decked him in the side of the head.

 

The police. Handcuffs. Them dragging him by the hair. Matt swore, snarled, bled. Snapped his teeth so hard he felt it clang around his skull.

 

A baton bit him and he lost a little time. He came to as two cops hauled him by the armpits away from the drunken floor. The first thing he saw: Mello’s boots skidding in the air as he howled at the cops holding Matt.

 

 _Mello_ , he thought,

 

and then he woke up in jail. Still handcuffed. So was Mello, sitting next to him.

 

Mello looked at him, dead-eyed.

 

“Hi. What the fuck,” he said.

 

“Hi,” croaked Matt. “Water?”

 

“No. What the hell did you take back there?”

 

“Mm, nothin’—”

 

“Fucking nothing? Did you even know that guy?”

 

“No.”

 

“Then what the fuck—” started Mello, but Matt found it very easy to slide away from him to rest his swollen, pulpy face against the bench. He didn’t want to look at him. He was realizing he was embarrassed of what he’d done, like being caught checking yourself out in a window. His rage had been dishonest. There was a showiness to it. He had wanted Mello to turn and see it, although he didn’t understand why.

 

A few months after that Mello would hold him still and kiss him for the first time, and then Matt would know. But at the time he’d honestly never considered it, had never even hesitated in raking his eyes over whatever tight leather nonsense Mello was wearing that week. Dancing reckless on his side of the line, thinking himself safe because Matt was straight and Mello was gay, and that was the beginning and the end of it.

 

He scraped his tongue over the concrete, trying to get some of the blood off. “He said some shit.”

 

“Hm? He was right.”

 

“Mel. Come on.”

 

“What? A fag’s a guy who’ll get on his knees and suck dick. I love sucking dick.”

 

“You know people don’t just mean it like that.”

 

“Fuck what people mean. Do I live for them?”

 

After a moment, he heard him sigh.

 

“And don’t try to defend me.”

 

“You’re welcome.”

 

He felt Mello’s hand in his hair, just for a second, before the usual space opened between them again.

 

()

 

 _Fuck what people mean_.

 

Fucking incomprehensible.

 

Could Mello believe that? Truly?

 

And what about _fuck what people do?_

 

Do the cuts in him still fill with blood? Or are they dry as eyes?

 

Was there ever a wound he couldn’t cauterize?

 

_No one will cry at the sight of me._

 

Matt would cry.

 

Would he cauterize Matt, if he told him what he knew?

 

Probably. Probably.

 

()

 

He’s had his phone on silent for years, but in his dreams it rings with the sound of a song whose name he can’t remember.

 

He picks up and listens to someone saying they’ve found him. That they need Matt to come in and put a name to his remains.

 

He wakes trembling and sends the third text:

 

[where the fuck are you asshole]

 

Half hoping, half terrified that it’ll go through, these two edges sawing through him back and forth, all night sawing him thin.

 

()

 

“Hi, I’m here to see Mello?”

 

“Last name?”

 

“Keehl.”

 

“One moment please… I’m sorry, we don’t seem to have anyone here by that name. Could you spell it for me?”

 

“Do you have Mihael?”

 

“We don’t have any Keehl.”

 

“That’s okay, never mind.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“I think I’m in the wrong place.”

 

()

 

[im sorry i kicked you out can you please just fucking answer me]

 

[i need to talk to you]

 

[are you mad at me]

 

[are you ok]

 

[can you just tell me if youre fucking ok you dont have to]

 

[come back or anything]

 

[please dont be dead]

 

()

 

He wakes to the sound of wolves. A familiar guttering engine.

 

“Hi.”

 

Mello is glittering, color high in his face. His energy is manic.

 

Matt stares at himself in Mello’s stone-black sunglasses. _Take those off, asshole._ He wants to hit him in the eye.

 

“Where the fuck’ve you been?”

 

“The valley of death. Fuck off, guys, start moving shit down.” The two wind-up boy toys in his backseat leap obediently into motion, pouring past Matt into his apartment.

 

“I’ve been drying out,” he says.

 

“I see it didn’t take.”

 

Mello shrugs. “I’ve a right to celebrate my release.”

 

“Seems counterproductive.”

 

“Oh, it was productive in there. No radio, no ass, nobody with two spare brain cells free to fuck one another. I was kicking with the gorillas in the fucking stone age. Must’ve wrote twenty goddamn songs a day.”

 

Matt nearly laughs. It’s beyond parody how selfish Mello can be. So he was writing music while Matt was looking for him in hospitals. That’s great for you, he wants to say. You checked yourself into rehab and checked yourself back out and went and bought a few bumps from your dealer just for kicks. That’s nice. I wish I could check myself out from caring about you. I certainly never fucking asked to be checked in.

 

I was worried about you.

 

I thought you were dead.

 

He cuts his tongue on the edge of unsaid things _._ Says through a mouthful of blood, “I texted you.”

 

“They took away my phone.”

 

“And never gave it back?”

 

“Guess I forgot it there. Why, did you have something to say?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, flaps a hand at the apartment. “Guys, leave that shit, we’ll get it later. We’re going out.”

 

“No. Get your shit out first.”

 

“Testy. Should I be worried about broken property?”

 

“Fuck your property.”

 

“I’m not worried. That’s why I like you so much. Come with us.”

 

“Sorry, did you listen to anything I just fucking said?”

 

Something in Mello’s face closes. “Come or fuck off,” he says. “I’ve no patience today.”

 

Matt wobbles on the edge of _fuck off_. Feels it catch between his teeth like an old bone.

 

()

 

Matt is in the grips of an awful high. Four in the morning, lolling on someone’s billiards table. Scuzzy green felt on his skin. He doesn’t remember losing his shirt. He feels cold, but he doesn’t know how to get it back.

 

Someone looms over him, bumping between his thighs. Matt shivers. Tries to close his legs. Mostly fails.

 

Glass against his lip. “There you go. Another one down the hatch.”

 

Gravity forces the drink down his throat. His head spins violently. “Did, did you put some shit in there?”

 

“No, babe, jesus. Calm down.”

 

“Where’s… where’s my—”

 

“You lost it. Strip poker. Fair and square.”

 

“Christ, _somebody_ ’s rolling.”

 

“Love these fucking tall-ass twinks, where the hell’re you finding them, Mello?”

 

“How’re you feeling?” Mello. _Finally, you prick. Where’ve you been?_ Oh, right: rehab, three months time wasted in two rails of coke, two tabs on the tongue. What a fucking joke.

 

Ringed hands flash into view. “How many fingers?” Matt’s vision is looping over and over, doubling back on itself like a nice 5/4 bass line. “He’s fine, he’s a fucking trooper.”

 

“Hey, eyes up here. It’s gonna be alright.”

 

Mouth on him. Foreign taste. Matt squirms.

 

“Kiss him. Fuck, that’s hot.”

 

“Yeah? You like it?”

 

“Give us a show.”

 

“Focus, honey. He’s real stuck up on you, Mello. He’s sweet.”

 

“He always gets the sweet ones.”

 

“He sure as fuck don’t deserve ‘em.”

 

“Don’t fuck with that asshole, babe. You deserve better.”

 

Hands burn down the slopes of him. Matt shakes. He bats at the hand snaking under the hem of his t-shirt, butts into the one cupping his forehead. “Mixed signals, darling,” the boy on top of him scolds. He is: mixed, churning. He hates this; he wants to want this, so fucking much. To piss Mello off, to spit in his eye; to turn him on, to warm him, please him, and either way for him, always him, like a moth to a fucking flame.

 

Upside down, he sees him watching him.

 

“Don’t let him go if he fights,” he hears him say. “He likes that.”

 

Laughter, whistling, and then a hand at the zip of his jeans. Breathe. His heart is going so quick. He’s so fucking far from sober, god, he’s really fucked up. _Breathe._ Breathe through it, goddamnit. Just fuck this guy, and fuck Mello.

 

He can’t.

 

He _can’t._

 

“Get _off_ —”

 

For a second he struggles to push the guy off—he’s a lot bigger than what Matt’s used to dealing with—and the panic of that, really, gives him the rest of the strength he needs.

 

“What the hell?”

 

“What the fuck did you give me?”

 

Why is the guy on the floor? Had Matt done that? Is Matt the one yelling? He doesn’t mean to.

 

Fuck. He needs to be by himself. He needs to get out of here.

 

“Nothing, you prick! Are you fucking serious?”

 

“All right, all right, everyone just—”

 

“What’re you trying to fucking imply? Huh?”

 

“Calm down, dude, he’s not trying to imply anything. He’s just messed up. And _you,_ man, you seriously need to relax. Really killing the vibe in here…”

 

Matt runs before he can apologize.

 

()

 

Outside he presses his forehead to the spinning wall. He feels so awful. He feels like an animal, like fucking dirt, sewage, nothing,

 

_filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy_

 

_—then why is she Facebook messaging you thirty times a day, Matt? Just friends, just grabbing a coffee, are you kidding me? And anyway, who the hell does that, lies to their girlfriend about what they were doing while they get coffee with their cute little redhead coworker with her tight little Lululemon ass? No? Then why were you late Friday when I told you— There wasn’t any traffic accident that day, not going in that direction. I checked. And anyway, I saw you were in that cafe for like an hour. You’re really going to make me show you the screenshots? Find My iPhone, dumbass. That’s what I thought. Block her. No, not later, right now. God, Matt, shut up. It’s fine. It’s no big deal. You making me feel like shit, like I’m not enough for you, when you know I— Don’t touch me. Don’t. Stop fucking apologizing. No, it’s on me. Stupid little me, I should’ve known better. Men. You’re all the same._

 

_Whores._

 

He vomits into the palm of his hand. It dribbles between his fingers.

 

Someone comes out into the alley. Matt recognizes Mello by his smell.

 

“Feel sick,” Matt mumbles.

 

“Stop bitching. If he’d roofied you you’d be unconscious on the floor by now. You’re just hopped up.” He pauses as Matt throws up again. “Shit, man. You’re fucking unbelievable. Going around accusing people of being rapists for no goddamn reason.”

 

Matt’s head is rolling uncontrollably. “He, he wouldn’t stop,” he mumbles.

 

“You didn’t tell him to. People fuck people at parties. You’re the only one who needs a goddamn babysitter. Why do you have to be such a prude?”

 

“I dunno, why’d you have to be such a slut?”

 

“Me? I’m as my maker intended.”

 

“Sure, but it’s, but it’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it?”

 

“Go on.” Mello grins a little, just at the edges of his mouth. Like blood on the molar. The promise of lethality. “Tell me how.”

 

“Well, I mean, considering the shit that happened when you were a kid.”

 

All the color leaves Mello’s face.

 

“What?”

 

Matt sways, drunk on the hit of power. He’s never had it, not once since he was seventeen.

 

He could get used to it: the feeling of being the one armed.

 

“Yeah, you know,” he slurs, “I _kinda_ figured being raped when you were like, what, twelve, would make someone a little more repressed.”

 

He pauses. He feels like he has more to say, but he can’t remember any of it. He feels worse, not better. Sicker. Poison courses through him.

 

He bends to vomit again and Mello’s boot meets him halfway down.


	4. He Burnt His Idols Down

They pull him aside for special screening twice. Open his backpack, scan his laptop keys. Matt grins at them. It hurts to smile. There might be blood in his teeth.

 

He lands in Russia twenty-eight hours later. Nobody looks at him. Nobody cares about him, the anomaly, red-haired California boy with the stitches and the stiff stance, the leg drag, the shivers that start as soon as he departs the plane.

 

Fuck him, it’s cold.

 

Feels good on the bruises, at least.

 

The first hotel he tries turns him away. Matt leaves amiably. The way he looks—he understands. He ends up at a no-questions-asked kind of motel. When he buzzes for the elevator, the whole building quakes. The elevator never does make it down. Matt gives up, winces his way up the stairs, leaning hard on the bannister. He collapses onto a bed that bristles with springs. 

 

Here he is. Thousands of miles from Los Angeles and Mello. Three days out of the hospital.

 

Mello took him there, he guesses. He doesn’t remember. When he woke up the room was empty. He listened to a nurse tell him he got mugged, that the police would be by later to take down his story. He twitched out a nod, sipped air through ribs like pulp and a face like an open pie. Mello’s fucking steel-toed boots.

 

They gave him his phone and his wallet in a plastic ziplock bag.  _ Interesting that a mugger would leave those,  _ he thought, but all he said to the tired-looking cop who showed up was, I don’t remember, I don’t remember.

 

Christ, Matt wishes that were true.

 

The way Mello had looked while Matt had held his eye and said  _ twelve _ and said  _ raped _ —

 

His face had opened like a wound.

 

Mello should have kept going. Put him in a coma. Ground him out entirely on that alley floor. Matt digs the tip of his index finger into the blackened hollow between two ribs. Presses down until pain ignites.

 

(And as for Matt’s anger at Mello, for beating the shit out of him, for whoring him out before that, and vanishing on him before that, for taking his house for a storage unit and his life for granted, for climbing off a naked boy while he held his hand out for the shirt off Matt’s back—

 

Well, Matt has forgotten all about that. Matt is always putting his anger down and forgetting to pick it back up. His house is cluttered with the refuse of unsaid things. He walks around it as politely as a stranger, stubbing his toe. He could take the garbage out, but he never does. After all, it’s just Matt there, and so it’s probably not worth it, and he’s used to it anyway.)

 

()

 

He slides beneath the surface of his next few days.

 

He doesn’t leave the room. He doesn’t get up, save to hobble to the toilet. His phone dies quietly. Dust building on the sheets over him.

 

What wakes him up, eventually, is a smell. It sneaks through his open window like the tip of a burglar’s gun. Outside, somewhere down on the street, someone has lit a cigarette.

 

Craving hits him like a shovel to the face. He hasn’t gone a day without smoking since he turned sixteen.

 

He coughs viciously. His head hurts and his hands are cold and twitching. He looks at them and then he turns away. He had learned this from her too. Xinlei had always been so good at being upset. She would starve herself, pull her eyelashes out. Pinch aching dots into herself, tiny blue-black dots like watermelon seeds, planted in neat rows down her ribcage. She’d pull her shirt up at him so he could see what he’d made her do.

 

And then when Matt was upset:

 

_ Really, are you? Couldn’t tell. I mean, look at you. That fucking vacant look on your face, sitting on your ass like a slab of dead meat, playing Metroid for the hundredth time, goddamn smoking like always—you think anyone’d look at that, and think, wow, he’s really going through it? Think anyone would call that unhappy? _

 

—No. Nobody would. For a while Matt tried harder at being unhappy. But if he went two days without speaking, she’d go three; if he went three days without eating, she’d go a week. And the problem was that Matt could never go a week. He got too fucking hungry.

 

Matt might never have hated himself more than the times he’d listen to himself chewing in the warzone of silence in her apartment, feeling pepperoni and grease rotting in his mouth.

 

Eventually, he realized he wasn’t meant to try harder. He was meant to realize that she could never make him as unhappy as he made her.

 

Near the end, when he’d started floating the idea of breaking up with her, he’d say:  _ I think I should go,  _ and she’d sigh,  _ sometimes you make me want to kill myself, Matt, really, you have no idea.  _ And when he’d say,  _ that’s bullshit, that’s really unfair,  _ she’d answer,  _ How I feel is bullshit? I’m trying to be honest with you, and that’s unfair? _ , fingering the knives in their kitchen drawer as she spoke, so that Matt’s heart immolated in guilt and fear.

 

Matt has many, many flaws. Maybe the biggest one was that he could never light himself on fire for her.

 

(And had Mello really told Matt once that he liked that Matt “didn’t fucking freak out”, that he was “chill”? Had they really been slouched together in some dorm room, smoking together, playing Metroid for the hundredth time? Was it even possible that Mello would say something like that, after wasting two whole aimless hours making out on-and-off with Matt—beautiful Mello, the blazing star?

 

It doesn’t seem likely.

 

Often it doesn’t seem likely that Mello would enjoy any aspect of Matt’s sack of a self at all.)

 

Smoke trots the room, sniffing its corners, touching Matt’s chest. Then the hunger starts in on him. Matt screws his eyes shut.

 

Mello would never have a problem killing himself for somebody. Matt knows this irrevocably. Knows he shouldn’t admire this the way he does.

 

An hour later he is limping down the stairs, hoping he finds a place that’ll take US dollars. He honestly wishes he were rather dead.

 

()

 

This town is not kind.

 

In America, cities sprawl. Kolokhna clings, like a tick to fur. Old cars and collarless dogs roam the asphalt, snapping at Matt’s ankles. Above the street corners and the howling of passing trains, statues of saints lurk in their alcoves. All their eyes look tired.

 

Matt is leaned up outside a convenience store, sucking down a cigarette. Five minutes earlier he’d been devouring an entire box of mini powdered donuts so viciously that pigeons, having approached, had then shied away. Now a snowfall of crumbs lies untouched around his feet. Staring down at them, Matt reminds himself of the melted core of a nuclear reactor. A thing so toxic even rats stay away.  _ Fit for roaches, Jeevas,  _ he thinks, licking the taste of sugar and smoke from his mouth. His body purrs with relief. Matt hates himself for it.

 

Water touches his face. He looks up. It has begun to sleet. This miserable fucking town. He watches two priests across the street pause to cross themselves in front of one of the saint-statues. A train blares past, spattering the three of them in red light. The sound of it is like a bombshell going off. Matt’s ears crawl with tinnitus.

 

Clinging to his cigarette, half-deaf, he realizes that they had really left him out here.

 

They left a child. Out here.

 

Mello must have grown up like a weed in a sidewalk. Surviving in spite of every trampling thing.

 

Matt can picture him. Aged fifteen and furious, maybe standing out there on the track, trying to stop a train with his life. Snatching bare-fingered at the steel as it raged past him.

 

Boys would have lost toes and fingers out there. Lost lives, too. Trying to make it out; or later, when they realized they wouldn’t.

 

And Matt pictures himself: going up the street after those priests, and taking a hotel pen out of his pocket, and stabbing first one, and then the other, and leaving them there, spurting in the snow.

 

His heartbeat spikes. He has dropped his cigarette.

 

He bends to pick it up, but it has already gone out against the slush of the ground.

 

Slowly, his pulse begins to congeal in his chest.

 

()

 

After an hour of driving, the cab driver says suddenly in English, “Mob?”

 

“Sorry?”

 

“You.” He indicates a circle around his face. “Mob.”

 

“Uh, no. No mob.”

 

“Hm.” Matt watches him chew on his cigar. “Big trouble.”

 

Then there is silence again. The driver continues to chain smokes without a break. The air reeks, but it’s too cold to even think about cracking a window.

 

Matt is not entirely convinced of the legality of this guy. His beat-up sedan doesn’t look like a cab, has no fare meter or license to speak of. But nobody else was willing to go this far out of the city.

 

The driver might cut his losses. It would be easy for him to dump Matt on the side of the road and leave him to freeze. Matt has considered this. Matt really couldn’t care less.

 

Maybe this shows. When the guy pulls them in at the foot of a dirt drive—in the ass-middle of nowhere, having passed nothing but frozen fields for the last hour—he turns to Matt and asks heatedly, “How you go back?”

 

“I’ll figure something out.”

 

“No, no car. City, very far. No car. You wait, long time.”

 

“That’s alright.”

 

“Cold. You wait very long. And night—” He cuts his fingers across his throat.

 

“It’s fine, man. Thanks.”

 

“Okay. ‘It’s fine, it’s fine.’ Okay. Чокнутый,” he mutters. “Night— _ pshht.  _ You die.”

 

Matt ignores him. He climbs out of the car and nearly falls over from the shock of the cold. With hands already jittering, he manages to peel a hundred dollar bill out of his wallet. “Thanks for the ride, man.”

 

“Crazy,” the driver says vehemently, seizing the money. He spits a stream of dark saliva onto the dirt, crosses himself, and peels away.

 

()

 

Matt trudges up the drive. Ancient cars putter past him, windows clogged with fog. Kids scrub circles in them to stare at him. In the distance, bells begin to toll. It is Sunday morning.

 

On the other side of the hill, he sees the monastery. Lying long and low and pale in the snow, like a half-buried bone.

 

Matt stumbles as he crosses into the chapel, its interior pitch-dark after the white of the snowscape outside. He feels his way into a seat in a pew near the back, next to a dark-haired boy and his parents. Slowly his vision adjusts. The crowd is thin, congregants scattered loose across the pews as hairs on a teenager’s lip. He peers through them towards the altar. He sees the backs of heads of balding men and men with thinning hair. There are no boys in robes. It seems Kolokhna is no longer an orphanage.

 

Which is a good thing, of course—but to think that Mello could’ve avoided all this if he’d just been born a little later, it lights a fire in him.

 

Matt gets up. So does everyone else. For a fevered instant, glancing around, Matt thinks they all know, too; that they’re about to rush the altar.

 

But of course not. It’s just the service beginning, the same way that every Mass Matt has been to with Mello begins. The language is different and nothing else: the standing and the sitting, the tuneless singing.

 

Peace be with you. And also with you.

 

Matt sits back down. He doesn’t stand again. The boy next to him stares. Matt doesn’t notice. He is looking at the statue of christ, hung above the altar. His stigmata are black and shiny as berries. They look painful. They remind him of Mello’s tattoos. Mello would pick some place, ribcage or wrists or the soles of his feet, and tattoo over and over the same area until there was nothing left but a black bar. He always went to the same sketchy shop, because the people there didn’t have qualms with him inking over skin that was already so heavily damaged. Matt would go with him, usually high and twitchy; Mello sober, calm in the face of the needle hitting him two thousand times a minute.

 

It was the ribs, this time. Matt winced at the jut of them. Mello was so damn skinny. They might as well be putting needle to bone.

 

Even sitting right there next to him, he couldn’t tell what work he was getting done. “What the hell’s the point?” he’d asked. “Nobody can even see them.”

 

“I know they’re there.”

 

“Fucking masochist.”

 

Mello rolled his eyes. “Do I look like I’m enjoying this?”

 

The tattooist and Matt both paused. Together they looked at him. Mello didn’t look like he was enjoying it. He looked like he was in pain. He wasn’t asking Matt to hold his hand or anything, but he was wound up tight as a corpse in rigor mortis.

 

“Don’t fucking stop,” Mello snapped at her. The buzz of the gun resumed quickly.

 

“But, like, why do  _ you _ want them there?” Matt muttered, queasy. “Is this, like, meaningful for you?”

 

Mello looked at the ceiling, eyes blown wide with adrenaline. “Pain never has a meaning,” he said. And that was all he had ever said about that.

 

Matt thinks, what a fucking crock.

 

Mello could never afford to allow pain a meaning. Just as he could never afford to let go of the things it must have hurt him so deeply to keep. His faith. His sexuality. Because strong and raging as Mello is, the single thing he cannot afford is to admit that the things that happened, did not happen with him, but to him; that he did not do them, but that they were done to him.

 

But Matt can afford it. Pain has a plain fucking meaning: that, not so many years ago, a rapist and a pedophile had decided that the price of his pleasure was the destruction of a child. That the child refused to be destroyed changes nothing.

 

A small movement jostles Matt’s side. The kid sitting next to him is trying to sneak a plastic object out of his jacket. A Game Boy Color, just like the one Matt had had when he was ten; when Mello was here.

 

Matt smiles slightly. Tucking his own hands into his pockets, he discovers all over again the object there.

 

A metal file.

 

He’d bought it at that same convenience store. The exchange rate had been extravagantly unfavorable.

 

He touches its handle. Sticky with sugar.

 

Matt feels better now. Calmer. Haloed in the sickly glow of the irradiance of the thing in his pocket.

 

When the service ends, it ends like a dream, and dreamlike he turns to the boy and asks him to show him the man he’s been looking for.

 

()

 

At the moment that Petr Ilina turns around to face him, the only thing Matt can think is that he’s got—

 

What’re those called again? Matt’s mom used to call them the good kind of wrinkles.

 

Laugh lines.

 

()

 

Looking at him, Matt knows he will never see Mello the same way again.

 

The fact is, even after all this shit—Yagami, the tapes, the drugs, all the strange and broken ways Mello has been the last few months—Matt’s still always had him on some kind of goddamn pedestal. Some kind of Mello-statue, some graven image. Matt couldn’t let him down if he wanted to. Mostly he hadn’t wanted to. He had wanted to hide forever in the cool of Mello’s shadow.

 

Looking at Petr, Matt hears the statue coming down. Light is spearing out from behind it, sharp and hurting arrows of light. Petr Ilina does not have devil’s horns. He has laugh lines. He has a nose pink from rubbing and bottle-thick glasses and dark and thinning hair. His beard straggles out from under an old shave, just like Matt’s. He stands with a more pronounced version of the slouch Matt is beginning to develop, the pinched shoulders and sloping neck that speak to hours hunched over books or computers. He does not look all that much older than Matt, maybe forty to Matt’s twenty-six, which is the same as twenty-seven to Mello’s twelve, and not the same at all.

 

He is not a wildfire or an earthquake, just as Mello isn’t a great forest, isn't the world. He is just a bad person, and Mello is only human.

 

“Американец?”

 

He reaches hesitantly towards Matt. His forehead is creased with concern. For Matt, Matt realizes, because Matt is hurt, has traveled five thousand miles and twenty-six years wearing Mello’s injuries and a few of his own.

 

His hand hovers over Matt’s face, its faint warmth as blistering as the sun.

 

“вы ранены…”

 

Matt’s left hand is cold and bloodless. His right hand opens and closes and opens again around the file.

 

When his thumb grazes the corner of Matt’s black eye, Matt does not close his eyes, and he does not look away.

 

“Mihael Keehl,” he says, quietly. “You remember him.”

 

And, just for a moment, Matt thinks he’s really done it. The way Ilina reacts. The jerk, the flinching breath. The way the whites of his eyes bloom.

 

But, even long after he has fallen to his knees, eyes rolling heavenwards as the other brothers approaching in alarm, the file is still in Matt’s pocket.

 

Mello was enough, all on his own.

 

()

 

Matt has been walking for forty-five minutes by the time the rusted-out sedan comes rattling up the road towards him. He doesn’t notice at first. Too focused on the mechanics of dragging one foot in front of the other when he has long stopped feeling anything below his knees.

 

The car’s window rolls down and pours out a cloud of cigar smoke, thick as tea.

 

“Hello. Hello! America!”

 

The driver grimaces toothily as Matt crawls, shivering, into the passenger seat. More of a display of teeth than a smile.

 

“I know I see you here. Crazy.”

 

Matt tries to respond, but the words don’t make it out past the violent clacking of his teeth.

 

“You are very lucky. Found such a nice guy like me.”

 

“Uh—uh-huh,” he forces out.

 

The guy lets him defrost in silence for a while before asking, “Why you are going to there?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

He presses his palms together, shakes them violently. “Боже? Pray?”

 

“No, I’m not religious. I guess—I thought I was gonna kill someone.”

 

“Hm.”

 

“But I didn’t.” The file juts into his side. Matt digs his fingertips into his eyes, excavating their soreness all over again from beneath the cold. Fuck, he’s exhausted. This goddamn shivering has him by the bones. “Maybe I should’ve. I don’t know.”

 

The man reaches over suddenly, knocking Matt’s elbow off the car’s center console. Popping the lid open, he lifts a clouded brown bottle out. “You want?”

 

“Uh…” Matt nearly coughs just at the stench of whatever’s inside.

 

“Is good.” The man swigs.

 

“I’m, uh, I’m good man. Are you—supposed to be driving with that?”

 

The man’s face twists. “Pah,” he spits. “ _ Pussy _ _._ ”

 

They drive on, parting the thickening dark like water.

 

Falling asleep in this guy’s car is almost certainly a bad idea. Matt watches the car swerve into the other lane for a nice long time before drifting back to the right.

 

He should stay awake.

 

_ Enough, Jeevas, christ. Give it a break. _

 

_ Your problems will still be here when you wake up, you know? _

 

He imagines them sitting by the roadside, friendly and waiting. Like crows on telephone wires.

 

Gently, his body leans him against the windowpane.

 

Far over the horizon, city lights are rising.

 

()

 

This time around, Matt presses the buzzer.

 

_ “Hello?” _

 

“Hi. It’s, uh. It’s me.”

 

A short pause. Then Yagami says,  _ “The elevator will be down for you in a minute. You know the number already, I presume. _ ”

 

()

 

Yagami’s apartment looks mostly the same. There’s a few small changes, pillows moved around, a new vase of flowers. The clock in the foyer that had driven Matt half-crazy with its ticking has been replaced with a small photograph in a brass frame.

 

Yagami ignores all of it, sweeping straight through the room. Matt follows him into what turns out to be the apartment’s kitchen. If the rest of the apartment seems sterile, the kitchen is—not even lived in; nested in, maybe, like an animal’s burrow. The dining table and the huge marble island are both swamped by frenzies of paper, metastasizing piles of books and binders and bulging manila folders. A file cabinet has been crammed in next to the refrigerator. All but one of the six dining chairs are occupied, with stacks of paper or a nest of charging cables; two have been moved together to support an industrial-size printer.

 

“Sit, please. Would you like some coffee? Tea?”

 

“Uh, coffee would be good. Is it okay if I move this?”

 

“Oh—let me—”

 

Yagami reaches over and shoves the cable-hairball unceremoniously off one of the chairs. He must not get many guests.

 

They end up squeezing in together at one end of the table, as if it’s a raft and they need to counterbalance the weight of all the clutter at the other end. Yagami pours a startling amount of sugar into his coffee.

 

“Mello mentioned you,” he says.

 

“Really.”

 

“Yes, after I made the mistake of going to your place that first time. He was very insistent that you not know about any of this.”

 

“I guess I went and fucked that up.”

 

“Maybe that’s his opinion.”

 

“So what’s yours?”

 

“I think it’s better that someone around him knows. And you’re close with him.”

 

“Yeah. Well, used to be.”

 

“Why used to be?”

 

“I dunno. We’re not—well, I mean I haven’t really talked to him yet, but I kind of think he’s either going to kill me or never fucking want to see me again.”

 

Yagami regards him steadily over the rim of his cup. “So why did you do it?”

 

“I—first of all, I didn’t know that any of this was going to happen, I swear. I didn’t come here looking for—” He waves his hand at the mess.

 

“Of course. How could you, when you didn’t know anything about it.”

 

“So, I—” He breaks off. “Fuck, it’s so stupid. I thought he was—I thought you guys were dating.”

 

This startles a laugh out of Yagami. It takes some of the Ken-doll edge off his handsome face, makes him seem more human. “I probably don’t need to tell you that nothing of the sort happened. Not even remotely. I felt many sorts of danger around Mello, but never a danger of  _ that _ . I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. I just had no idea you’d think… so you and him are in a relationship?”

 

“I… I guess? I don’t know.”

 

“It seems like the kind of thing you would.”

 

“It’s complicated.”

 

“If you think you’re in a relationship, you should tell him.”

 

“Uh huh.”

 

“I’m serious.”

 

“Fuck that, man. He’d kick my fucking teeth out.”

 

“What if you were going to die?”

 

“... What?”

 

“Or, let me put it this way: what if he was? Hypothetically, of course. If you knew for a fact that tomorrow something was going to happen to him. Would you wish you’d told him?”

 

Yagami says this in such an odd tone that Matt can’t help asking, “ _ Is _ something going to happen?”

 

“No,” he says calmly. “Not that I’m aware of, at least. But life doesn’t make any guarantees.” 

 

Matt doesn’t answer his question— _ where the hell did that come from? _ —and after a pause, Yagami says suddenly, “You had something to give me, I think.”

 

“Oh. Right.” Matt digs around in his pockets and hands over the SD card.

 

Yagami inspects it. “It’s impressive that you managed to get a hold of this.”

 

“It wasn’t that hard.”

 

“Maybe for you. Most people wouldn’t have found it so easy.”

 

“You get a lot of burglars?”

 

“Not exactly. Let’s just say you’re hardly the first to try to find me.”

 

Matt looks again at the stacks and stacks of paperwork. “So what is all this anyway?”

 

“Did the name ‘Wammy’s House’ ever come up in your, ah, research?”

 

“No…”

 

“That’s not surprising. It’s a pretty secretive organization—although I guess that’ll all change soon.” He sets the card down with a tap on the table. “This is an investigation. It’s run and funded by Wammy’s House, and it’s been going on for about two years now. I only play a small part. I interview people, do research, whatever’s needed, but I’m a lawyer by training. Corporate by day, but all the work here is pro-bono.” He gestures at the snowbanks of paper. “As you can see, you joined us at the final push. We’ll be going to press very soon.”

 

“You’re publishing something?”

 

“Among other things. The stories of many, many people will be written. Including Mello’s—anonymized, as he requested. Still, the world will know them.”

 

“How many people?”

 

“At this point, we’ve spoken to over a hundred and twenty individuals.”

 

“That’s… huge.”

 

“That’s the goal.”

 

“Why are you—”

 

“Because it’s the right thing. Because my better nature demands it, these days. But in the beginning, I joined the team because I know the founder of Wammy. Knew. We met at university. He dropped out in our third year, but we stayed in touch. Then one day, out of the blue, he called me to help with this. I had more than enough going on in my life, but I couldn’t refuse.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“If you’d ever had the chance to meet him, you’d understand why not. He was the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. I don’t think that’ll change, now that he’s gone.”

 

“You were friends.”

 

Yagami smiles. “Yes. We were.” He smooths the edge of a curling post-it down with his pinky finger. A small, tender gesture. “This was his work, really. He should’ve been here to see it through. All he and his accomplished.”

 

They don’t talk for much longer after that. Yagami makes it clear that he won’t press any charges, as long as Matt keeps his mouth shut and stays out of the way of the investigation. He has no doubt Yagami won’t hesitate to ship his ass to prison if he makes any trouble. It seems he has friends in higher places than Matt cares to know about.

 

On his way out, the photograph in the foyer catches his eye again. It’s of two people, Yagami being one of them. The other is a slight, pale young man with eyes so huge and dark they remind Matt of a horse.

 

The contrast between this consumptive-looking vampire guy and Yagami, fit and tan in his tennis clothes, is pretty funny. Still, it’s a nice photo. It gives off the same comfortable warmth thrown off by arms around shoulders, elbows in ribs. A fleeting sweetness.

 

“Is that him, in the picture?” he asks. “Your friend?”

 

“How’d you know?”

 

Matt shrugs. “I dunno. Lucky guess.”

 

Yagami regards him for a moment, before inclining his head slightly.

 

“Tell Mello hello from me,” he says. “And good luck.”

 

()

 

He looks at the number Yagami gave him a long, long time before dialing.

 

“Mello?”

 

Mello doesn’t say anything. Matt can’t even hear him breathing. Wherever he is, it’s dead quiet. Maybe he’s sitting on the floor of a bathroom, like Matt is, in the dark, like Matt. Maybe his heart is loud, like Matt’s. Maybe he doesn’t trust himself to speak.

 

He doesn’t hang up. That’s all Matt knows.

 

Into the dark, Matt threads words like a tightrope: “Can we talk?”

 

()

 

Mello shows up nearly an hour late. Hands in his pockets, he comes slowly up the nave of the church they’d arranged to meet at. Stands in front of Matt. His skin has no color, his face no expression. The lens of his sunglasses is drawn up hard as a shield between them. They don’t hide how bad he looks. How his exhaustion wears him, like a hand wears a puppet.

 

For a second, they just look at one another. Inspecting each other’s damages.

 

“I talked with Yagami,” Mello says. “I know what happened.”

 

“I—”

 

“I don’t,” he continues slowly, “really give a shit about whatever excuse you have for what you did. Actually, I don’t really know why I’m here. Do you?”

 

“I know I fucked up.”

 

“Good for you.”

 

“Mel,” he says quietly. “I’m really sorry.”

 

Something in Mello’s face shutters. “You’re sorry—I bet you are,” he spits. He’s already retreating from Matt, backing back down the nave. “You’re always sorry about something. Well you can go get fucked.”

 

“Wait. Can I… I want to tell you something.”

 

“Save it,” he snarls.

 

“Not about that. About me.”

 

Mello pauses.

 

Crazily, in the moment, Matt nearly does want him to go. If he goes, Matt won’t have to speak. If he goes Matt will carry Xinlei in his mouth to the grave.

 

But Mello doesn’t go anywhere.

 

And if Matt’s being honest with himself, really honest, Matt can’t blame this on him. Matt has built himself this fucking cage, and now there’s only one way out.

 

_ It’s probably for the better, Jeevas. _

 

It probably is.

 

Staring straight down at his lap, he says very quietly, “There was this girl before I met you.”

 

()

 

He tells him how they got their vicious on with each other.

 

He tells him about ears pierced and words thrown, fights picked and fights received.

 

He tells him about the time he caught her hand as she swung, held her hard by her wrists to keep her from clawing at him, and she had said, “I’ll call the fucking police, Matt, I swear to god,” and spattered him all over her kitchen floor as soon as he let go.

 

He tells him how he was forbidden from talking to any woman, from looking at any woman, from seeing his family, from seeing his mom, even when the doctors called and said her early-onset Alzheimer’s had gotten worse, that he needed to come out as soon as possible.

 

He tells him how he’d left anyway, that time, after they’d danced the championship distance with one another, gone twelve rounds stairwell-to-bedroom-to-lobby, receptionist staring, them uncaring. Dragged himself eastwards to El Paso, worn to shreds and Xinlei on him like a chain, calling and calling him, ten times, twenty, thirty.

 

He tells him how he’d blown through that red light at ninety miles an hour and missed the semi truck passing through by less than a dozen feet.

 

He tells him he’d shook so hard afterwards that he had to pull over on some abandoned shoulder, where he’d called his mom and pleaded to her, “I can’t make it stop”, begged her, “How do I make it stop?”, as poor Momma mumbled in confusion on the other end of the line, unable anymore to recognize the sound of him.

 

But that had been the end; he tells him, too, about the start of things. Her intelligence, her strength, her confidence, her sexiness, her humor, her laugh, his.

 

And this is a pain that Matt hadn’t anticipated: having to remember the beginning for the first time in a long time. He had forgotten the view from up there. How hopeful everything had looked.

 

What a waste. He had loved her. Maybe still does, a little bit; will a little bit always love her.

 

He stops then. Out of words and near tears. Matt doubles nearly over, buries his hot face in his sleeve. Prays to the ringing silence, let it be enough _. _

 

“Look at me.”

 

“No.”

 

“Matt.”

 

“I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

 

“That  _ cunt _ .”

 

Matt flinches.

 

“Fuck her. Fuck all of her shit.”

 

“Mel, please—”

 

“You didn’t deserve that.”

 

“I know. But it’s done.”

 

“I could kill her.”

 

“I don’t want you to. Would you please stop?”

 

After a moment, Mello adds more quietly, “I’m sorry it happened. But it doesn’t change what you did.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I said I didn’t want excuses.”

 

“This isn’t an excuse. I—like, I took something from you, so I wanted to give something back.”

 

“Those things aren’t the same,” he says, nearly gently. “Your choice to take. Your choice to give. I didn’t get a choice. Remember?”

 

“I know,” Matt says. He looks up at Mello, then. “Are we done?” he whispers.

 

When Mello says nothing, Matt adds, “If you want me to leave you alone—”

 

“Could you?”

 

“If you want me to.”

 

“And you won’t do anything.”

 

“I won’t…?”

 

“Fucking christ—pull your head out of your ass, Matt. All that shit you just told me, about her, the way you were after? You fall too deeply into people. I won’t have your blood on my hands.”

 

_ Oh.  _ “No, I’d never—I wouldn’t—not to myself. I promise. You don’t have to care about that.”

 

“Of course I fucking care,” Mello snaps. He sounds brittle. Matt has never heard him sound brittle before. “There is no one fucking else I would have done this for. Shown up, here, after the shit you did. Nobody. And I shouldn’t have beat you up that day, but I would have killed anybody else, and I need you to understand that.”

 

“Okay. Okay, I get it, I...”

 

Fuck, this hurts. Matt had had such a good fucking thing going, and he ruined it.

 

He watches Mello’s hand tighten compulsively around the cross of his rosary. Clinging to it, like it’s all he got.

 

“I’m going to go now. I’m, um.”

 

Fuck. He isn’t fucking allowed to cry during this, but he doesn’t know if he can stop it. Maybe he’s crying already. He has no fucking idea.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, because he can’t think what else to say, and because if this is—if this is going to be it, he wants to leave Mello with that, above all. “I”— _ love you _ , he thinks, but manages to strangle that in its crib and says instead, “Thanks. For everything.”

 

It feels totally fucking inadequate. It is. Probably anything he could say would be.

 

_ Enough. _

 

Cut him free.

 

Matt walks.

 

()

 

Matt walks straight down the nave and out the door. He navigates the stairs carefully, skipping no steps. He walks across the parking lot and gets in his car. He double-checks both lanes of traffic as he pulls out of the lot. He uses his blinker as he merges left two lanes and then right two lanes and parallel parks between a Land Rover and a Pinto because he’s breathing quite hard and has realized he can’t really feel the steering wheel or his hands.

 

He sits there.

 

He begins to worry he’s going to throw up. He cracks the passenger-side door, craning over the sidewalk of the adjacent grimy IHOP restaurant. IHOP, he thinks, is probably the ideal place to have a breakdown. Nobody inside an IHOP has ever given a shit.

 

Staring directly at a blackened constellation of gum splotches, stomach heaving, Matt thinks that he should probably get going soon. The one thing his body has always been gifted at is delaying the realization of bad things, but it can only hold things off for so long before they hit. Before that happens, Matt needs to get to his apartment. Otherwise he’s going to be stuck here for the next few days, in his car, not capable of eating or moving or thinking really, and while he mostly doesn’t have a problem with that, he can’t really afford to accumulate any more parking tickets, and he doesn’t have any weed or alcohol in his car.

 

He glances at the IHOP. There’s a woman sitting at the window-facing counter, gnawing on a soggy pancake, staring straight through him. She looks like she’s working through some issues.

 

Matt pulls his head back inside his car and shuts the door. He begins to pull out of the spot and then nearly rear-ends the Pinto when his phone goes off.

 

“Hello—”

 

“I’m deciding if I can do this,” Mello says.

 

Behind Matt, a car honks long and loud before swerving around him. That jumpstarts Matt’s brain enough to allow him to pull back into the spot.

 

“I need time,” Mello is saying, sounding, let’s face it, tired as shit. Matt sounds tired as shit too. This week has gone on a year; this month’s been going on all his life.

 

“Maybe a lot,” he says. “Maybe forever.”

 

Matt swallows. “Forever’s okay. As much as you need.”

 

“Yeah. Alright.”

 

Matt makes a fist with his free hand, pounds it hard into his thigh. The woman in the IHOP’s eyes flick to him for an instant.

 

“Okay,” he says finally. “You—you know my number.”

 

Mello huffs. “Yeah, I know your fucking number. I’ve known your number forever. And also, there’s like, Facebook.”

 

“You use Facebook?”

 

“Bye, Matt.”


	5. Magnolia

He spots Near from a distance, hovering next to a park bench. He’s wearing what’s got to be a children’s grey tracksuit, his hands jammed deep into its pockets, and a bizarre neon-colored beanie. A large white dog sits nearby. Matt assumes it’s someone else’s, until he sees the leash trailing from Near’s pocket.

 

“Hey man. Who’s this?”

 

He holds his hand out and the dog sniffs it genteely, her nose tracing a cold wet line down Matt’s palm like a paintbrush.

 

“Jude.”

 

“He’s yours?”

 

“She. Yes.”

 

“She, okay, cool.” The dog has a face like a broom handle and looks like a living shag carpet. “She’s what, like a greyhound? But I’ve never seen one with long fur before.”

 

“Borzoi. Let’s go along the lake.”

 

He glances sidelong at Near and the dog as they walk. They make a funny pair, tall animal and short boy, trotting along with their identical near-white curls of hair. “I figured you for more of a cat person,” he says.

 

“A pet is a pet. I thought—”

 

He breaks off. Matt follows his line of sight and sees a woman jogging along the path towards them, smiling brightly. She slows as she approaches them.

 

“Oh, your dog is simply gorgeous. Do you mind if I—”

 

Near swerves abruptly off the path, stomping away into the tall grass without a backwards glance. Matt grimaces at the woman. “Sorry, he’s not—sorry,” he says, before turning and following Near onto the lawn.

 

They crunch along in silence all the way to the edge of the lake, breaking damp circles in the frosted grass. Matt can see the ankles of Near’s pants darkening with dew. He pulls up suddenly at the water’s edge, like he’s just realized he can’t walk across it.

 

“She’s a crowd pleaser,” says Matt.

 

“It’s even worse later in the day. But she needs walking. Perhaps I’ll go at four.”

 

“In the morning, are you fucking kidding? You’re gonna get mugged. People like people with dogs, Near. It tells people you’re approachable.”

 

“It’s intolerable. Did Mello give you that?”

 

“Huh?”

 

Near gestures at his hairline. 

 

“Oh.” He’d had to have some stitches done. He briefly considers lying about it, if just to avoid admitting that Near’s right, but he doubts Near would buy a story about him falling down stairs. He sighs. “Yeah.”

 

Near snorts, pointedly.

 

“I deserved it,” Matt counters.

 

“I doubt that very much.”

 

“You’re wrong about that.”

 

Near flicks a glance at him. Surprisingly, he leaves it alone. They watch Jude trot off down the shoreline and startle a bunch of ducks into the water. Seemingly satisfied, she turns around and lopes back over to them, nosing Near’s palm.

 

“You don’t know how Mello and I met,” Near says.

 

“You mean you weren’t enemies from birth?”

 

“We saw the same therapist, for about a year.”

 

“You had a therapist?”

 

“Court-mandated,” Near says crisply. “As was his, I’d assume. We had back-to-back sessions, Thursday afternoons, two to four. We competed in that, too, like everything else. Who could say the least. Make the therapist cry.”

 

“Jesus.”

 

“We were immature and cruel. And very angry.”

 

“I can’t exactly imagine you guys talking it out together.”

 

“Hardly. I didn’t feel sorry for him, just as I didn’t spare myself any pity.”

 

“He wouldn’t have wanted it. Especially not from you.”

 

“I wouldn’t have given it, even if I were capable. Still, what we want and what we need is rarely aligned.”

 

“This is kinda a lot, man. I always thought you guys hated each other. I mean, I know for sure Mello wanted to beat you into the dirt. And now you’re saying you sympathized—”

 

“‘Sympathy’ is a line too far,” Near snaps. “I didn’t sympathize. I  _ understood _ that—”

 

He breaks off. His gaze, never fixed on Matt’s from the start, skitters out to rest in the mist of the lake’s far bank. Near’s never been big on eye contact. Just another way he and Mello are opposites.

 

“—when something happens like what happened,” he continues suddenly, “your life becomes a form of damage.”

 

His hand, Matt notices, is curled almost into a fist in the furry nape of Jude’s neck. The dog sits still at his side, waiting patiently.

 

“There becomes another you. Some idea, of the you from before. Had that person grown up, he would have brought the world light. But what happened eliminated him. And the you that’s left behind will never even know what he was, let alone have hope of becoming him. That becomes, I think Mello would agree, a harder thing than what happened in the first place.”

 

“But you don’t know that.”

 

“Don’t know what?”

 

“That you can’t become—that person. Maybe you already are.“

 

Near shrugs. “On a certain level, we are nothing but reactions on reactions. Particles never straying beyond the bounds of their rules. It isn’t unthinkable that in the future some supercomputer might take in the state of the world at the moment of my birth and plot my life as seamlessly as man once plotted the path from earth to sky at Kitty Hawk. Destiny becomes gravity; once unfathomable, now a constant, known and tamed. On another level, I defy it. Every particle of me defies it, because it is abhorrent. So, Matt. Do the laws of my universe allow me to believe in anything beyond the inevitable? Do Mello’s? Are we bound, or are we free?”

 

Under Near’s hands, Jude shifts, whining slightly.

 

He opens his hand suddenly and lets her go. Down the shore a new flock of ducks have come drifting in. She trots towards them, panting happily.

 

“Sometimes I envy her,” Near says. “If only for instants.”

 

“I still can’t really believe you have a dog.”

 

“Trust me, it wasn’t my idea. My therapist suggested I could use more companionship.”

 

“And dogs are easier than people.”

 

“Infinitely so. Her demands on me are limited, and mine of her.”

 

After a moment, he adds quietly, “And she’s—very soft.”

 

Far along the lake, Jude circles and begins to lope back to them.

 

()

 

Matt turns on the television, and.

 

“—first part of a series, detailing explosive new allegations of—”

 

“—and the Pope has not issued any statement so far—”

 

“—who, or what, is the Wammy Foundation? Stay tuned for—”

 

The screen hisses into silence.

 

He reads the article, all of it. Then he texts Mello.

 

()

 

They meet at the beach. Mello drags him up and down the boardwalk, pushing through tourists like bowling pins. They cut a jagged seam south into Venice, where Mello eats two and a half danger dogs and all of Matt’s curly fries before stalking out onto the sand past the bonfires of the drum circles, bending over and neatly vomiting into the ocean’s flickering edge.

 

The old impulse to go to Mello, rub his back, flares over Matt like wind. He cups his hand against it and lights a cigarette in the hollow. He watches Mello spit again into the sand. The mess is washed away in seconds.

 

“Did you read it?”

 

“Don’t fuck with me.”

 

“Did you?”

 

“Fuck  _ off. _ Leave it alone.” Mello sloshes seawater in his mouth, spits the ocean back at itself. He glances sideways at Matt. “I did,” he says abruptly. “I just—don’t fucking want to go over this right now.”

 

“Yeah, no, that’s… It’s fine. I get it.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

“… Yeah.”

 

“Believe it or not, I actually got fucking work done today.”

 

“No kidding.”

 

“Not a new song, nothing that big. But, just the edges of—something.” He drops onto the damp sand next to Matt. “Fuck, who knows. Something or nothing, lately I can barely tell. But I have it, somehow.”

 

“It’s you.”

 

“Hm? What’s me?”

 

“It’s not ‘somehow’,” says Matt.

 

“Mm,” is all Mello replies, but Matt can tell he’s pleased. He turns halfway towards Matt and stops there, the edge of one cheekbone and his eyelashes catching the sparse firelight. Matt sees the kiss they would’ve shared three months ago unfold and then peel away between them, like a breath between waves.

 

All Mello does is flick his cigarette into the ocean.

 

“I have to go,” he says.

 

“Mhm,” says Matt.

 

()

 

This is where they talk, when they talk, the bits and pieces that they manage: at the beach, or in Matt’s car, or in Mello’s. Radio on, windows open. They find the places where they don’t have to look at one another, where there’s not too much silence. Where Mello can leave if it gets to be too much.

 

He will: Matt remembers him climbing right out of Matt’s car in the middle of the 10 freeway. Out of his passenger window he watched him stalk away through six lanes of gridlock. Somebody honked and Mello had screamed right back. Slamming both fists against the hood as the driver flinched in her seat.

 

The articles keep coming out. Neither of them bring it up again. Matt assumes Mello’s been reading them. He knows he does.

 

Eventually he stops trying to pick out Mello’s stories from the rest. There is so much horror.

 

Mello tells him very little, and even then Matt cries, listening, a lot of the time.

 

“You don’t have to do that,” Mello says, one time. “I don’t.”

 

“Sorry,” Matt says. Not for crying, but that Mello never does anymore. That maybe he can’t; that he’s been robbed of that, too, the chance to mourn.

 

Yagami emails Matt out of the blue. He sends him a list of people, the names and contact information of others he’s interviewed. People who’re interested in connecting. He doesn’t explain why he’s sending it to Matt and not Mello. It seems self-evident.

 

Matt prints the email out and folds it down into a thick stub, worrying it for days in the pocket of his hoodie. Waiting for a good time. Of course, there’s no good time for a thing like this, with people like them.

 

He gets coffee with Mello on a Wednesday. Mello shows up with his forehead smudged with grey.

 

“You’ve got some shit on you.”

 

“It’s ash,” says Mello. He waves off Matt’s offer to get him something, ordering nothing but a tall cup of water. Matt watches him sip at it as they sit outside, smoking in silence. He seems calm and clear, placid, like lake water. Luminous in the late afternoon light, looking a little distant. It makes Matt sad. Mello is so rarely at peace. It would be kinder to leave him alone.

 

Matt takes the printout out of his pocket, unfolds it halfway onto the table between them.

 

Mello looks sideways at him. “And here I thought you were going to propose.”

 

“Yagami gave me this. It’s a list, of other—other people.”

 

“So you two are buddies now. That’s an unwelcome development.”

 

“It might help.”

 

“It won’t.”

 

“You don’t know that.”

 

“I will not fucking talk about this again. I have been over it. I’ve scratched every millimeter of this bullshit open. I am not going to perform it again for anyone, let alone Yagami’s little pity party.”

 

“Okay. If you—if it’s done for you, it’s done. That’s okay.”

 

“Done,” Mello scoffs.

 

“Is it?”

 

“Some things don’t finish.”

 

It’s as good as an admission. “Will you just take it?” Matt asks. “You don’t have to talk to anyone.”

 

“Fuck off.”

 

“Would you do it for me?”

 

“For you?” Mello rounds on him. “Why should I do it  _ for _ you? You don’t do shit for me. Because I don’t make demands on you. I don’t hint at you that you should go see a shrink. I don’t give you lists of groups to go to.”

 

“What? That has—I don’t have to go to, to fucking groups.”

 

“Because nothing happened to you? The same way nothing happened to me?”

 

“That’s bullshit, man.”

 

“Tell me how.”

 

“Are you fucking serious? There’s no comparison there. I didn’t get—”

 

“Raped? I did, and you got abused. I can say it. Could you?” Mello drags the life out of his cigarette in one breath, stabs the butt hard into the table. “Your girlfriend fucked you up within an inch of your goddamn life. Five years she abused you, and you can’t even speak the word. So don’t fucking lecture me about closure. Give me a light.”

 

Matt gives him a light. He says nothing. There is nothing he could say to that.

 

Mello inspects the cigarette. “This is my last one,” he says.

 

“Why?”

 

“I’m giving them up.”

 

“Oh, like, for Lent.”

 

“Yeah, but I’m also thinking for forever.”

 

“What the fuck? You’re  _ quitting? _ What the hell for?”

 

Mello rolls his eyes. “‘Cause cigarettes give you cancer, Matt. I want to fucking live.”

 

“Okay, cool, whatever.” Mello’s tone is making Matt feel oddly defensive. “As long as you don’t start giving me shit about it, because let me tell you, the second you start evangelizing—”

 

“I think you should too.”

 

“... quit?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Man, that’s not—don’t fuck with me.”

 

Mello just looks at him.

 

Eventually Matt says weakly, “Get out of here with that shit. I can’t just—stop. I’m not you.”

 

“You can,” Mello says. “I’ll take your goddamn list if you talk to somebody.”

 

Eventually, Matt says, “So take it.”

 

()

 

Matt’s trying to be his own person these days. Yeah, maybe he’s twenty-six or some shit, maybe it’s kind of pathetic, but better late than never, right?

 

He smokes a little less, goes out a little more. Meets up with old friends from college. He hangs out with Near now and again. Near loans him Jude occasionally, if he’s traveling for a conference or something. Matt kind of likes owning a dog, or co-owning one, at least. He buys a dog bed for her, keeps it in the back of his Jeep. Some weekends he drives up into the mountains and walks around aimlessly, panting his way up slopes as Jude trots easily besides him. He gets a sunburn for the first time in years. It doesn’t feel half bad.

 

Mello is deeply suspicious of dogs. It’s one of the things that’s most obviously un-American about him. He comes into Matt’s apartment, freezes, points at her and says, “What the fuck is that?”

 

“Mello, meet Jude. Jude, this is the asshole I told you about. I went over this with her,” he says to Mello. “If you steal shit out of my fridge, she’s gonna go after your ankles.”

 

“When the fuck did you get a dog?”

 

“Oh, it’s Near’s,” he says, and watches as Mello damn near explodes.

 

()

 

Matt reads the last sentence of the last article of the series:

 

_ “To L, who started it all.” _

 

()

 

Mello kicks him out in front of a Walmart.

 

Well, he tries to. Matt refuses to leave. He’s dealt with a lot of Mello’s bullshit. Today, in general. He has sat six years in the passenger seat of Mello’s life, sat silently as Mello challenged cliffsides and tore his skin off against the guard rails of every road.  _ If you’re trying to commit suicide, don’t phone me about it, _ Matt had once said. Honestly, Matt’s getting real fucking tired; has had about enough of sitting politely and pretending he’s not afraid for him.

 

Lately, he’s fearless with Mello. He didn’t know he had it in him. “You are a fucking safety hazard,” he says at him over the roar of the engine, and, “You almost hit somebody,” and “When’s the last time you slept, anyway?” “I’m going to call the cops on you,” he warns. “Seriously, man, cut this shit out.”

 

Mello ignores him. Smoking furiously. So much for Lent. He pulls them screeching into a parking lot and snaps his fingers at Matt like he’s a dog. “Out.”

 

“No.”

 

“Get the fuck out.”

 

“Why, so you can go drive yourself off a fucking cliff?”

 

When Mello doesn’t respond, Matt reaches over, snatches the keys out of his ignition, and throws them out the window.

 

“You motherfucker!”

 

It does actually take them a long time to find the keys. Matt hadn’t meant to throw them directly into the biggest, scratchiest bush in sight, but that’s where they end up finding them. Afterwards they sit together on a parking curb, grubby and sweaty and pissed off, only a little at each other.

 

“I hate this,” Mello says. Picking a burr out of his bangs.

 

“Me too,” says Matt, miserably. He is sitting on his hands to keep them from finding their way into Mello’s hair. “I keep seeing her. The other day, I was at Ikea, right? There was this chick in line in front of me. Black hair, braids, like, that’s it. I fucking freaked out. Like I literally had to leave and get into a line at the other end.”

 

“Ikea?”

 

“Is it a problem?”

 

“Busy decorating your dorm room?”

 

“Not the point.”

 

“You don’t have to shop at Ikea. Call me next time.”

 

“Don’t sugar-baby me. It’s condescending.”

 

Mello doesn’t smile. He grinds the heels of his palms so hard into his eyes that Matt winces. The tip of his cigarette describes little blood-red arcs in the air.

 

There was a big photo of Ilina, in the last article. He was standing in some classroom, pink-nosed and stoop-shouldered as Matt remembers him, mouth open mid-sentence. Gesturing above the soft color-mottled pelt of the hair of a crowd of boys, any one of whom might be Mello, might not be; could’ve been Matt, could’ve been anyone at all.

 

Mello goes to chain a new cigarette. Matt slides it out of reach.

 

“You were quitting.”

 

“Couldn’t.”

 

This scares Matt. He tries not to let it show.

 

“Can’t even fucking manage that,” Mello rasps. “I’m good for fucking shit.”

 

Matt hates feeling so helpless. “He’s going to jail,” he says. “They’re going to put him away somewhere he can never do it again.”

 

“I know.”

 

“He deserves it.”

 

“I fucking know already.”

 

“You could talk to him. If you wanted. At the trial.”

 

Mello shivers, head to toe.

 

“That won’t be for years.”

 

“We’ll be here, in years.”

 

“There’s no point. He probably doesn’t even remember me.”

 

“He does.”

 

“Hm?”

 

“When I was in Russia—”

 

_ “What?” _

 

“Oh, shit, did I not…? Shit, shit. I forgot to tell you—”

 

“You  _ forgot  _ to—”

 

Matt gets the story out, Mello getting paler with each word. By the end he looks nearly ill.

 

“So what did he say?” he asks faintly.

 

“I don’t know. I don’t speak Russian.”

 

Mello’s laugh is manic. “Of course. Jesus christ. Of course you fucking don’t—”

 

“But when I told him—”

 

“Told him, told him fucking what? Like you could’ve said anything to him, not anything he’d understand—”

 

“I said your name—Mel, listen, I know he understood that much. He—his face, the way he looked… He remembers you.”

 

“You don’t know th—”

 

“I do fucking know it,” Matt snaps. Mello says nothing, curled into himself as still as the day after Vesuvius. Matt forgets himself entirely, grabs him by the shoulder and shakes him ungently. “ _ Hey _ . Mello.”

 

“Yeah, uh huh,” says Mello, opening his eyes. They brim the color of snow, lighter than anything Matt’s ever seen. “He does, does he?”

 

“Yeah,” says Matt. “For sure.”

 

Mello nods, just once.

 

()

 

Sometimes I get dreams.

 

_ Matt hears him whisper it. _

 

_ Matt’s eyes are closed but Matt isn’t asleep yet; but Mello probably thinks he is, definitely needs him to be, so Matt lies still and pretends he doesn’t hear him say: _

 

I get these dreams.

 

You know what happened to Yaroslav?

 

There was one night. I was up late. Waiting for Petr. He’d been gone all day and then he came in. He saw I was awake and he came over, sat on the edge of my bed, just like I’m sitting on yours. He was a fucking mess. Crying. He kept trying to talk to me. Saying he had something to tell me.

 

I knew what he wanted to tell me. What had happened. It was happening to him too. I could tell.

 

He looked so fucking desperate. So weak. I hated that. How he looked. I wanted nothing to fucking do with him. I told him to piss off, and then I left.

 

I stayed in Petr’s room that night. It had a heater, so I didn’t notice there was a cold snap overnight. Even though it was spring already, supposed to be getting warmer. But when I went back to the dorms the next morning the floor was iced straight over. In the morning, I get up early, and I sneak back into the dorm. Everyone’s still asleep.  _ His _ bed is still empty, but somebody’s lying in mine. And I pull the blankets off, and I’m the one who finds him. He was dead. He froze to death in the night.

 

And in the dream, it’s always the same. I walk in and turn back the covers and it’s me. My face. I’m the one who died.

 

When I wake up, there’s always, like, this split second where I…

 

So I can’t fuck up. I can’t fall behind and I can’t look back, I can’t fucking fail. Because then I’ll be the one left there.

 

Does that make sense?

 

It will be me.

 

()

 

Still, it’s never always the sorrow. The rest of the world spins on. Mello is busier than ever. He goes on tour for a couple months, playing bass and backup singing for an up-and-coming solo artist. Still writing, posting shaky videos of swaying songs written in the back of swaying buses. There he is on late night, performing in high-heeled boots. Matt doesn’t quite get hot and bothered, but he could see a younger, hornier him getting hot and bothered.

 

_ I slept with this guy already _ , he thinks, feeling vaguely impressed with himself.

 

He texts him [step on me dad].

 

A couple hours later, Mello replies, [it’s “daddy”, jeevas. keep it professional.]

 

Matt touches his own smile in the dark.

 

Fuck, this shit is so hopeless. Is there a life he hasn’t loved him in?

 

He texts back a peace-sign emoji.

 

At three in the morning, he’s woken up by his phone buzzing.

 

[i’m back thursday.]

 

After a moment, Matt responds,

 

[see you then]

 

()

 

Mello comes back. He goes straight from the airport to some gig in a club downtown. The set is supposed to last one hour. He plays for seven. Matt watches clips of it on Youtube as he babysits him. When he’d shown up at Matt’s place he couldn’t speak, could barely walk. Tremoring like a man fresh off the electric throne. Matt had stuck a thermometer in his mouth, watched the readout skyrocket to 102, and planted him firmly on his couch, where, miraculously, he’s stayed ever since.

 

Mello comes partly unstuck from sleep, limp and delirious.

 

“This has like 30,000 views,” Matt says to him.

 

Mello grunts. “Wake me up when it hits 3 million,” he croaks, and goes back under again.

 

He mostly sleeps, the first three days. Matt expects him to leave on the fourth. He stands over his semi-lucid form and says, “I know you’re going to go, but I really don’t think you should yet.” Mello shifts a little but doesn’t respond. Maybe he’s asleep again. Probably that’s what gives Matt the courage to mutter, “I wish you wouldn’t.” He goes out to the corner store for a run of pizza and tissues. When he comes back in, the sight of the dark lump sprawled on his couch nearly gives him a heart attack. He clutches at himself like a granny at her pearls.

 

“Fucking hell,” he whispers. “Scare the life out of me, will you?”

 

He didn’t leave.

 

He didn’t leave!

 

Euphoria. Matt watches more clips. They’re really electric. The crowd seething like your skin after a good kiss.

 

98,000 views now.

 

Rolling Stone puts out a clickbaity piece: This Surprise Seven-Hour Set At Tangerine Is The Best Thing That’s Happened To Us This Year.

 

Mello is really fucking something.

 

He glances at him.

 

Currently, he’s crunched up in the corner of Matt’s ancient armchair, swimming in one of Matt’s old holey t-shirts and eating peanut butter straight out of the jar with a fork. He looks like a goddamn raccoon.

 

Matt’s never had the pleasure of dealing with Mello sick before. He figured Mello would handle it the way he handles everything; by the throat, with his teeth. Actually, Mello’s kind of being a huge bitch about it. The way he orders Matt around, christ. You’d think he’s had an amputation, not some fucked-up cocktail of chronic overwork and plain old flu. He bitches about how messy the apartment is and how shit his voice sounds and the limited number of channels on Matt’s television. He acts as if Matt denying him his fifth bar of chocolate in half an hour is a goddamn act of war.

 

He’s caught sight of him looking. Lifts one earpad of his headphones. “What’re you staring at?”

 

“Who do you think?”

 

“Enjoying the view?”

 

“The view is disgusting,” says Matt. He doesn’t quite manage to keep the affection out of his voice.

 

Mello gives him the finger.

 

“When are you getting out?” Matt asks, half-joking.

 

“No,” says Mello.

 

“Will you at least pay some goddamn utilities?”

 

He doesn’t even respond to that.

 

Matt doesn’t push him. The thing is, Mello doesn’t fool him. Matt knows he’d like nothing better but to run. That he hates being vulnerable like this, that it might even terrify him. He screams at Matt  _ take care of me!  _ to mask the sound of him screaming at himself,  _ let yourself be taken care of!  _ That’s just how he is. He is making an Effort.

 

So Matt says nothing. He makes Efforts too. He vacuums around Mello. He cracks some windows, tries to air the apartment out. He even swings by Mello’s gigantic abandoned penthouse to fetch some of his stuff.

 

This, apparently, is too much for Mello; he sneers at him, says something about not paying for a maid.

 

_ Don’t grovel, Matt, do you know how unattractive it is when you do that, if I wanted to date a little girl I’d go to the bar and pick up a little girl— _

 

No, Matt thinks. It’s not that. Mello is just scared. He gets mean when he’s scared. Matt knows this.

 

He ignores the insult. He doesn’t let himself wallow. He’s honestly very proud of this. He’ll tell Mello about it, later. 

 

“I wanted you to be comfortable,” he says quietly. “I can put them back if you want.” He fiddles around with Mello’s toothbrush, drops it rattling into a cup in the sudden freezing silence. “Do you floss? I’ll get some floss.”

 

“Aren’t you the mother I never asked for,” Mello spits, pure vitriol. “When are you going to fucking kick me out?”

 

It’s the most defenseless Matt has ever heard him sound.

 

“If you want to leave,” Matt says, “you can leave.” There, he’s thrown in a little bit of a dare. God knew Mello could never resist one.

 

Mello doesn’t leave. In the evening, in the middle of ignoring Die Hard 2 together, Mello sticks his feet in his lap. They’re kinda gross, cut up and scabby from whatever heels he jumped around in for seven hours. He offers them to Matt like a cat offers you a dead bird: with his nose turned up in the other direction, like he could care less what you think of it. Has Mello always been such a fucking child? Probably Matt was too busy worshiping him to notice.

 

Matt takes the apology for what it is. “Get some kinder shoes,” he says, digging his thumb into the arch of Mello’s foot. The sound that Mello makes is its own reward.

 

()

 

In the end, Matt puts up with Mello strutting around in nothing but his underwear and Matt’s old shirts for far, far longer than could be expected from any reasonable person. The thing is, Matt is so busy Giving Him Space that he doesn’t even consider that Mello hates wearing clothes that aren’t his own and is maybe, just a bit, trying to seduce him. To be fair, no one has ever tried to seduce Matt before. It’s a novel concept.

 

Later, Mello will tell him that this is the longest stretch in the past five years he’s gone without sex, including when he was in rehab.

 

Right now, it’s an orange-flavored afternoon, and they’re making out on the couch.

 

Matt grabs for Mello’s waistband. Mello allows him to get a hand inside, but when Matt reaches for his dick he grabs Matt’s wrist and pulls his hand back. Matt makes an encouraging noise in the back of his throat, and Mello does hold his wrist down, but just for a second before releasing him.

 

“Goddamnit,” Matt whines.

 

“Calm down.”

 

“You’re not,” he accuses. It’s true. He can feel Mello’s hard-on pressed like a pipe into the side of his leg.

 

They still for a moment. Mello’s panting a little. So is he.

 

“I thought we weren’t doing this,” says Mello.

 

“I want to,” Matt mumbles, and then he says, “That time I went to Yagami’s place, it was because I thought you guys were dating, and I didn’t like it, and I wanted to find out something about him that would make you stop. I always hated it when you slept with other people. I’m sorry.”

 

Above him, Mello stills. Then he sighs, long and loud, lowering his head to butt his forehead against Matt’s chest. “That’s nothing to be fucking sorry about, you moron.”

 

“But I didn’t tell you,” Matt whispers. “I never said,” and Mello doesn’t contradict him, because he isn’t wrong. “Sorry,” he repeats. “Can we date? Like for real?”

 

Mello kisses under Matt’s jaw, over his throat. He is silent for a long time.

 

“I don’t know,” he says eventually, very quietly. “You make me kind of fucking scared.”

 

“Scared of what?”

 

“That I’ll fuck things up. I don’t want to.”

 

“You…”

 

_ Won’t,  _ Matt was going to say,  _ can’t, more than I have.  _ But he understands it’s not his place, to make that promise for Mello. To choose for him, to put more pressure on a life already so blackened by flaw and fury.

 

“You’re okay,” he says instead. “Like, I trust you.” When Mello doesn’t respond, he asks, “Do you trust me?”

 

Mello says, simply, “I love you.”

 

()

 

And then the sun turns the page of day.

 

He wakes up to an empty bed and the sound of singing.

 

Mello is sitting on Matt’s kitchen table. Eyes closed, chin tilted down a little, like a child dozing. He plays the guitar with his bare fingers, cradling it against him like something precious.

 

Maybe that was the moment. Matt remembers they were at some college party, crammed into a dorm room with five or ten other people, hotboxing. Someone had found a guitar under the bed and they’d passed it around, grabbing and plucking half-cruelly at its strings like children at a butterfly’s wings before Mello rescued it from them. Matt can still see clearly how he looked through the purpling haze as he sat up cross-legged against the wall and began to play.

 

Maybe it was then. Hearing him pull soul from the air. Maybe that was when Matt first imagined taking the long nails of Mello’s right hand and the short of his left and folding them between his palms like a prayer.

 

He’d have been happy to live his life on his knees, but lately, life’s shown him the time is for rising.

 

Lately, Matt’s inclined to agree.

 

Mello opens his eyes and looks at him.

 

“It’s nice,” Matt says stupidly.

 

“Hm,” he hums.

 

“It’s gonna go on the album?”

 

He shrugs, one-shouldered. “I like it, but I can’t tell if it’s any good.”

 

“I like it too,” Matt says. He wants to go to him, but something holds him back. Some shy feeling, something tender and new. He balances there, on the edge of sunshine, shifting his weight foot-to-foot like a kid.

 

“Play it again?” he says. “I missed the beginning.”

 

Mello nods.

 

As he begins, Matt thinks of the inside of an eggshell.

 

The room and the guitar, the open window. Him and Mello and the music.

 

Everything is the color of light.


End file.
